1985 was a hell of a year for Hong Kong cinema. Classics like Heart of Dragon, My Lucky Stars, and Police Story were all released in the span of a few months, showcasing the multifaceted talents of stars Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, and catapulting the long-time friends into stardom. All three films did big […]
It follows Taoist priest, Master Kau (Ching-ying) and his two students Man-choi (Ricky Hui) and Chau-sang (Chin Siu-ho) who eke out a living exorcising evil spirits in Republican-era China (1912-1949). When asked by the wealthy Master Yam (Huang Ha) for assistance in the reburying of his father, Ren (Yuen Wah), the three jump at the potentially lucrative gig. However, after exhuming the corpse, Kau realizes that Yam’s father has transformed into a monster. They attempt to secure the beast, but it escapes and begins a rampage, infecting Choi in the process. While Kau tries to slow down his student’s transformation, Sang gets himself into some hot (and rather steamy) water with a seductive ghost named Jade (Pauline Wong). With both his pupils in danger and the deadly Ren still on the loose, Kau must save Choi and Sang while figuring out how to stop the hopping jiangshi before it can kill them all.
“The making of this film was a truly unforgettable experience,” recalled director Ricky Lau in an interview1 decades after the release of Mr. Vampire, and from the shadow that crosses his face as he says this, it sounds like the process was both a dream and a nightmare. Lau began his film career as a cinematographer for Sammo Hung, working on several of the filmmaker’s pictures throughout the early 80s. Looking for a new challenge, Lau approached his boss about the possibility of directing. Hung, who would go on to produce Mr. Vampire, agreed to give him a chance. Since horror was his favorite genre, Lau decided a fright flick would be the perfect arena for his first crack at the bat.
Several people, including Lau himself, would piece together what would become the script for Mr. Vampire (the tally of writers would eventually total three, with Barry Wong and Cheuk-Hon Szeto also contributing). For his part, much of what the director brought to the story was drawn from his childhood. Growing up, Lau’s uncle had been a Maoshan Taoist who had regaled him with many a spooky story drawn from China’s rich well of folklore. It’s from here that the idea of using the jiangshi as the film’s titular baddie was unearthed. However, the undead ghoul that would eventually appear in the film and the one we meet in the original lore are not identical.
“It has to be stressed that a jiangshi is not really a vampire, at least not in a sense that most people tend to understand the term,” writes Dr. Katarzyna Ancuta in her fantastic chapter2 featured in The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire. She goes on to assert that the depictions we see of so-called “Chinese vampires” in various Hong Kong horror films are a westernized version of the jiangshi, a recontextualization of the creature through the lens of the classic European bloodsucker. In actuality, while they hold some similarities, they’re a different beast entirely.
First appearing in accounts as far back as the 12th century, the jiangshi can be found in several story collections charting the eerie and grotesque. In Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (1766), we hear of a corpse reanimating and chasing a man through a village before getting its outstretched arms lodged into the trunk of a tree. A story in Yuan Mei’s anthology What the Master Would Not Discuss (1788) tells3 of a walking cadaver whose “face was withered and black like dried meat,” while another describes a monster with “unbearably foul” breath and hands that are “as cold and hard as iron.”
The 18th-century philosopher and writer Ji Yun also explored the jiangshi extensively in his work. He explains that they come in two varieties. The first category is weaker and consists of corpses that have come back to life due to proper burial rites not being followed. These are generally easier to dispatch. The second is far more destructive and terrifying. These “spastic” creatures have been reanimated by an outside source, such as a demonic spirit, and seek to drain those they encounter (often former friends and family) of their qi (their breath or essence). Yun describes them in chilling detail4: “While in the grave, their emotions have soured, their thoughts gone feral, and their rank bodies have fermented and stiffened into more monstrous possibilities.”
This consumption of lifeforce doesn’t appear across the board in depictions of the jiangshi in folklore, and in no accounts do we read of them hopping in the way we see their cinematic brethren do. What would eventually be presented in Mr. Vampire appears to be a coupling of Lau’s folk horror memories and characteristics that had been established five years earlier in Sammo Hung’s Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980). From this marriage, many of the tropes we see today of the jiangshi – the hopping, the outstretched arms, their reliance on hearing over sight, and the era in which they dress – appear to have emerged.
Mr. Vampire’s production was a challenging one. Shot over the course of five months, it had run through its initial budget of HK$4.5 million halfway through filming, resulting in a sheepish Ricky Lau having to approach Sammo Hung for more money (the picture would eventually cost HK$8.5 million to make). It was filmed both on location in Taiwan and on one of production company Golden Harvest’s soundstages, and a strict 24-hour shooting schedule was followed. Cast and crew alike barely slept, navigating everything from set mishaps (there was a massive flood at one point) to constant retakes of stunts and fight scenes.
The latter in particular provided many issues for both Ricky Lau and actor Lam Ching-ying, who was doing double duty as co-choreographer of the film’s many combat scenes. In addition to the fact that minutes of an onscreen fight could take weeks on average to shoot, working with kung fu film staples like hanging wires and trampolines always presented challenges. Under no circumstances were either allowed to appear in a single finished frame of the film, so the crew would spray paint them to match the colors of whichever portion of the set they were in.
On top of the technical problems, there was the tremendous physical strain the actors were put through during production. Quite a toll was taken on their bodies, even for the most experienced martial artists. In an interview years later, Chin Siu-ho would speak of one shot where he would do a backflip off a platform several feet in the air. Asked to perform the stunt multiple times, he began to feel tremendous pain in one ankle with each subsequent landing, but kept this to himself. He chuckles now at the fact that they ended up using the first take of the stunt in the final product. He was treated well overall, maintains Siu-ho, but the standards for the movie were extremely high, and everyone was anxious to meet them.
Mr. Vampire made its Hong Kong premiere on November 2nd, 1985. During its initial midnight screenings, Ricky Lau was so anxious that he would hide in the lobby during the film’s first scenes and listen to how the audience would react. If laughter bubbled up through the theatre, he would breathe a sigh of relief, quietly slink in, and take a seat in the back row. “It was like a court verdict,” recalled Lau later. “Guilty or not guilty.”
The verdict in the end was guilty, and the sentence was dollar signs. Audiences loved the film, helping to make it the fifth highest-grossing Hong Kong movie at the domestic box office that year. At the 1985 Hong Kong Film Awards, it was nominated for no less than 11 awards, ultimately winning “Best Original Film Score.” Work began immediately on a follow-up, with Ricky Lau returning to the helm and Sammo Hung once again producing. Two more sequels were released, both featuring the same directing/producing partnership, and, for a time, a new Mr. Vampire film became a yearly occurrence.
“Jiangshi Mania” had officially arrived. In addition to the official Mr. Vampire sequels, there were countless spin-offs and lookalikes, all of which varied in quality and success. But as the public quickly learned, the now infamous monster could no longer be contained to the world of celluloid. Toys, board games, and other merchandise featuring the jiangshi began appearing on shelves both domestically and in countries like Japan and Taiwan. Phantom Fighter, a video game based on the first Mr. Vampire outing, was released for the Nintendo Famicom in 1988. This wouldn’t be the last the gaming world would see of the hopping vampire either, as the 1994 arcade classic Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors would introduce Hsien-Ko, a jiangshi with metal claws for hands. The character would reappear in several Capcom fighting games in the years to come.
Obviously, this explosion of success came as a wonderful surprise to the cast and crew who worked on the original Mr. Vampire. It’s not every day that something you create causes a pop culture phenomenon, after all, and there was no way they could have expected anything close to the reaction their picture was met with. But it’s a testament to what makes the film continue to play so well 40 years after its release. It’s an amalgamation of elements and tones that not only work deliciously together but also offer something for movie fans of any palate. What’s more, it executes these different styles beautifully, whether it’s slapstick comedy, bone-crunching kung fu, or heart-pounding horror.
However, it’s the jiangshi who captured the imaginations of so many audiences around the world; a piece of China’s past that has come to personify the Hong Kong horror genre for millions around the world.
