How China’s jiangshi vampires created a Hong Kong horror movie empire

Taoist priest fights a demon with lightning-emitting blade, cutting the chains around his neck. The succubus — who has taken the form of a beautiful human woman with a popped-out eyeball bulging out of a mass of loose brain — recoils in pain and bends down out of frame. Her static-shocked, tangled hair looks like porcupine quills when she stands back up. She then lets go of her head, which flies through the air and emits a theatrical snarl.

Golden Harvest Hong Kong’s film production company, Golden Harvest is the one responsible for this battle. Mr. Vampire There are many more horror-comedy/action-mashups under the umbrella term jiangshi cinema. Through the 1980s and ’90s, a bizarre microgenre of lucrative oddities took shape around the undead ghouls referred to as “hopping vampires” in the English-speaking world for their distinctively goofy means of hopscotch-style locomotion. (They have to jump around, you see, because of the rigor mortis; “jiangshi” translates from Mandarin as “stiff corpse.”) These Chinese vampires didn’t turn into bats, they rarely had fangs, and they were often described as ghosts, but there’s unmistakable vampiric DNA in their parasitic feeding on qi, the energy of the soul. The stock baddies added their own mythos of physical attributes (pallid blue-green skin, with appearances ranging from the monstrous to the otherwise ordinary) and weaknesses (glutinous rice, hens’ eggs, sheets of paper inscribed with talismans) to a long literary heritage of bloodsuckers overlapping here with the regional folklore of China.

Most significantly, the jiangshi film continued the vampire’s collision of a medieval past with an unfamiliar present, as relics decked out in the hanfu wardrobe of the Qing dynasty rose again to bound through a booming, industrialized Hong Kong. A five-title collection now streaming on the Criterion Channel gathers some tough-to-find choice cuts from a canon that combined hallucinatory experiments with color, surreal slapstick, blistering kung fu, and innovative in-camera effects simulating the soul’s passage in and out of the body. The films in this collection are not just for the obscurity enthusiast, but also as a telling document of a nation that was in tumultuous political and cultural times, with tensions between tradition and modernity and East and West, religion and secularism.

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The vampire had prowled Chinese fiction in various iterations as far back as the 18th century, first in Pu Songling’s supernatural anthology Liaozhai ZhiyiA spiritual ancestor of The Twilight Zone in its pointed societal critiques via short-form suspense. 1936’s Midnight Vampire Piggyback on the popularity just imported Dracula With a Europeanized Villain, that same year Wuye Jiangshi They saw them as a quick resolution to an emotional family drama about greedy children. Advertised as “Filmed entirely on location in Hong Kong!” 1974’s Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires grafted the Shaw Brothers’ peerless martial arts prowess onto the Hammer Film model in an international co-production that saw director Roy Ward Baker regularly going berserk on day-wage actors who couldn’t understand his instructions.

The jiangshi film wouldn’t reach maturity until 1980 with The Spooky Side of LifeThe first film to use the jumping menace to tell a story, rather than as an accessory. Sammo Hung was an unconventional lead actor, with his soft-chined chin resulting from the broken bottle of Coke he picked up in a streetfight. Sammo Hung played Bold Cheung who is a friendly yet unrelenting fighting master sucked on by his spouse and his employer. Sammo Hung, an unconventional leading man with his soft chin and a scar from a broken Coke bottle in a street fight, directed himself as Bold Cheung, kindly yet guileless fighting ace cucked by his wife with her employer. The typically episodic plot serves mostly to show off physical feats both of humor and combat. After a spell induces a jiangshi to mirror all of Cheung’s movements, the pair puts on a copycat homage to the Marx brothers’ classic bit from Duck Soup In a later line of influence, Sam Raimi borrowed a severed hand gag from Evil Dead 2. (Encounters Of The Spooky Kind II, a 1990 sequel produced and choreographed by Hung, has no real relation to the continuity, but features one lively sequence in which a zombie made out of cockroaches tries to bite off our hero’s penis.)

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Mr. Vampire’s contours were shaped through this friendly friction between different periods. series, the other key plank of the jiangshi picture’s heyday. First, it was set in the Republican period of early 20th-century, before communism, and in 1985. Director Ricky Lau and producer Hung found jokes and insights by bridging the divide between old and new. In the franchise’s debut, the two boobish assistants of the obligatory priest-exorcist wind up at a Westernized tea ceremony hosted by a worldly businessman, who chuckles at their provincial cluelessness as they’re puzzled by black coffee. The transcontinental comedy of errors even bled into real life with Golden Harvest’s abortive attempt to produce an English-language remake led by Dallas star Jack Scalia and Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas, a costly disaster shut down by studio head Raymond Chow with the immortal declaration of “We started, but we need not finish.”

The follow-up went for broader culture-clash gags with a concept oriented around assimilation, as a little boy jiangshi roused from his age-old slumber must acclimate to the ’80s, aerobics jokes and all. While rip-offs piled up (most curious among them 1990’s Magic Cop, a cross-pollination of genres meant to capitalize on Jackie Chan’s name-making Police Story Mission drift sends the Mr. Vampire Films can go to unlikely places but are hindered because of a lackluster interest or lack of basic logic. It’s more like a Samurai Saga in the third and fourth movies, but the fifth is the most unhinged: Fetuses who aren’t carried to full term appear as malevolent spirits, with one possessed by a nanny to locate a pregnant mother whose child will be a good vessel to house the spirit.

A little lower down on the budgetary food chain, Hong Kong got its own answer to Ed Wood in Z-movie maverick Godfrey Ho, famed for yelling “I can’t see you acting — more acting!” at one performer he deemed not far enough over the top. Robo Vampire Brazenly stealing the beats from RoboCopThe episode was filmed in the United States. Mystery Science Theater 3000 for it; the jiangshi in Ho’s The Vampire Raiders The goal is to terrorize bikini-clad babes in order to gain control of the hospitality industry. The genre is almost on the verge of collapse, as Ho cuts corners to save money, and often uses footage from mainland Chinese, Thai or Filipino films in his work. If you assume that that would render his films near-incomprehensible, you’d be right — but it also enabled Ho to crank out multiple features toeing the line between “lovably slapdash” and “lazy” for the price of one.

The good times could not last forever, decisively ended by a pair of pivotal developments in the late ’90s. In 1997, the handover of Hong Kong to China marked a shift from an affluent capitalist culture to one that was more secular and eschewed superstition. Seven months after his death, Golden Harvest’s founder Leonard Ho set the empire in motion toward its full shut down of production by 2003, focusing on finance and distribution.

It would be a cameo in some obscure dialects, but it is a common occurrence in pop culture. What We Do In The Shadows In a memorable episode of 2000’s animated series, a television show commands its own 30-minute slot. Jackie Chan Adventures. The hopping dead never rose again. That chintzy, resourceful style of filmmaking where anything goes was allowed to thrive soon fell victim to digital polish. Though, if the movies are to be believed, they’re only a single incantation away from a bouncy, bloodcurdling comeback.