words yvonne teh

Tales of the supernatural have been among the most entertaining of Hong Kong’s catalogue of local movies.

Many moons ago, a friend from Ireland and I sat in a living room in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and watched a film made halfway
across the world in Hong Kong. As I thrilled to the visual inventiveness unfolding before my eyes, I could see that my companion, more used to a diet of commercial Hollywood fare, was not reacting so well.

Shortly after the head flew off a lovely young maiden who turned out to be a lovelorn ghost, my fellow viewer decided enough was enough and walked out of the room in a huff! I, on the other hand, sat transfixed right up until the often bizarre but wonderful movie’s end. I exulted in my belated introduction to a uniquely weird, wild and often hilarious exotic cinematic realm in which not only were attractive women likely to be ghosts in love but blue-faced, stiff-armed Qing Dynasty hopping vampires in court attire – blind as bats but never transformed into such creatures – abounded, prompting kungfu-fighting Taoist priests chanting incantations, often complete with well meaning but bumbling assistants, to come to the rescue.

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, Hong Kong cinema underwent a time of exciting change and innovation. A fabled new wave of local filmmakers arose to show their audiences what they could individually and collectively do. Early on in their development, a few tried their hands at making horror movies: for instance, some 21 years before the poster of her Visible Secret (2001) was banned from the MTR for fear it would scare people too much, director Ann Hui had already made her mark with The Spooky Bunch (1980).

The next year saw actor-director Sammo Hung come out with Encounter of the Spooky Kind (1981). It was a groundbreaking work that successfully combined martial arts, comedy and supernatural elements into a single trans-genre offering. More slapstick than truly spooky, it introduced many in its audience to the undead beings whose imaginative origins lie in a novel Chinese practice of tying corpses of people who died far from home to one another and transporting them back to their hometown on long bamboo rods which, when flexing, made the corpses look from a distance like they were hopping in unison.

Known in Cantonese as kyongsi (which translates as ‘stiff corpse’), hopping vampires went on to prominently figure in a series of popular films starring Lam Ching Ying, the Peking opera-trained pal of Sammo Hung who had played a policeman in Encounter of the Spooky Kind. The first of these, Mr. Vampire (1985), introduced
Lam as the Taoist priest hero whose most recognizable physical
trait may well have been eyebrows so long and bushy they looked like a single exuberant outburst of forehead hair. Suffice to say that this stunt- and comedy-filled ‘horror’ was a smash that earned over $20 million at the box office and spawned a Mr. Vampire Part 2 (1986), Mr. Vampire Part 3 (1987) and Mr. Vampire Saga 4 (1988) along with the Lam-less New Mr. Vampire (1986) and Mr. Vampire 1992 (1992)!

Although he reportedly tried to fight being typecast, the talented Lam ended up taking on roles in a number of other movies that strongly echoed those in the landmark Mr. Vampire and its sequels. For example, he found himself playing the One Eyebrow Priest in Vampire vs Vampire (1989) and The Ultimate Vampire (1991), a similar ghost-busting character in The Musical Vampire (1990) and a contemporary police equivalent in Magic Cop (1990). Moreover, after his popularity flagged in the final decade of the 20th century, Lam managed to temporarily revive his acting career two years before his untimely death from liver cancer by appearing in the title role of the ATV series, The Vampire Expert (1995).
Joey Wong is another supernatural movie alumnus who has ended up being typecast. Another Wong (Pauline) may have portrayed the lovelorn ghost in Mr. Vampire whose voluntary decapitation permanently put my Irish friend off Hong Kong cinema, but Joey it was who appeared in a supernatural screen tale released a couple of years later that, with an $18.8 million total at the local box office, may have earned less than Mr. Vampire but arguably went on to wedge itself even more deeply into local movie viewers’ hearts in the following years.

A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) tells the story of star-crossed lovers, the pure-hearted male half of whom was charmingly portrayed by the late Leslie Cheung. Where it differs from such Western classics as, say, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet or Verdi’s Aïda, however, is that – three years before Patrick Swayze’s character returned from the dead to romance Demi Moore’s in Ghost (1990) – one of the lovers doesn’t hail from the realm of the living. As with Mr. Vampire, this magical ode to attraction bred official sequels as well as copycat works like Fox Maiden (1991), all of which had Joey Wong in the role of a frequently watery-eyed, forlorn and put-upon ghost in love.

The main man behind A Chinese Ghost, Tsui Hark, could hardly complain about this influx of imitators into local theatres, though. For one thing, he produced A Chinese Ghost Story II (1990), the official follow-up film which reunited Joey Wong and Leslie Cheung, and threw Jacky Cheung into the mix for further star power, and A Chinese Ghost Story III (1991) which had a bald Tony Leung Chiu Wai, taking over the leading male role from Leslie’s tax collector character. Additionally, guess what tale he turned to 10 years later when bidding to revive his own flagging career by making A Chinese Ghost Story: The Tsui Hark Animation (1997)? (Though, in fairness, that work still can lay claims to innovation as it was Hong Kong’s first computer-generated animated feature film.)
All in all, and if truth be told, Tsui Hark has gained quite the reputation over the years for effectively remaking old classics and reviving traditional Hong Kong movie genres. And in the case of A Chinese Ghost Story, what we have here is a film whose cinematic antecedents include Li Han Hsiang’s seminal The Enchanting Shadow (1960), which cast screen legend Betty Loh Ti as a kind-hearted but ill-fated supernatural being and the lesser-known The Blue Lamp in Winter Night (1974) directed by Li’s former assistant, Yao Fung Pan. Furthermore, all these movies can trace their lineage back to the early Qing Dynasty and The Magic Sword, one of no less than 491 mostly supernatural tales compiled by Pu Songling into Liaozhai Zhiyi, a work best known in English as Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (aka Strange Tales from Liaozhai) that is said to date back to 1740 (although the earliest extant print version has 1766 as its year of publication).

Over the years, other filmmakers have turned to other stories in Pu’s celebrated collection for inspiration and source material. For example, King Hu, the auteur who in reputation if not output may well be the king of Hong Kong filmmakers, also looked to this Chinese literary classic for stories to adapt into two films. The first is none other than A Touch of Zen (1971), the fantastical Buddhist-themed wuxia work which made cinematic history by winning the Technical Grand Prize at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival and whose breathtaking bamboo forest fight scenes served as inspiration for that in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). And while the second, The Painted Skin (1993), is best known as the late filmmaker’s final work, for our purposes, the movie whose story centres on a maiden trying to escape the king of Yin/Yang with the help of a group of Taoist priests also is notable for Joey Wong, almost needless to say, playing a woman who turns out to be less human than she initially appears to be after all...