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Ching Sui-tung directed all three A Chinese Ghost Story films and continues to deliver FantAsia films like The Sorcerer and the White Snake, but Tsui is the undisputed father of the genre. FantAsia is based on a longstanding body of fiction in movies and literature known as Wuxia, which means ‘martial heroes.’Ī Chinese Ghost Story was produced by Tsui Hark, who spearheaded FantAsia with his Zu: Warriors From The Magic Mountain four years prior to A Chinese Ghost Story, and followed with many other FantAsia classics like The Swordsman, Once Upon a Time in China and Green Snake. It includes superhuman Kung Fu (which means lots of wirework and flying about), magic spells and supernatural beasts.
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FantAsia is the Chinese answer to sword and sorcery flicks. If the horror, comedy, and Kung Fu menage a trois wasn’t enough, A Chinese Ghost Story was one of the first films of a then-burgeoning period genre called FantAsia.
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In the wake of that film, Kung Fu Horror Comedies became a thing of its own with plenty of franchises, most notably Mr. Adding martial arts action comes naturally because in Chinese culture sorcerers and exorcists are Daoist or Buddhist Kung Fu masters. The addition of Kung Fu is purely Hong Kong and can be traced to Sammo Hung’s groundbreaking Encounters of the Spooky Kind in 1980. It releases tension and leaves the audience unguarded for the next jump scare. This makes for great comic hijinks as hapless characters struggle to hold their breath while gruesome jiangshi shove their rotting noses close to their mouths trying to pick up the scent.Ĭomedy is a common horror film device. Often a jiangshi is blind but can smell breath. They hop along mindlessly with their arms outstretched like sleepwalkers, and feed on the life essence – or qi – of the living. Part zombie, part vampire, jiangshi are corpses that are usually reanimated by demons or Daoist sorcerers. Asian horror films are known as jiangshi, which is the name of a specific spooky hopping ghost found in Chinese folklore that proliferates these films. When A Chinese Ghost Story premiered in 1987, it was already part of a unique category – the fusion of horror, comedy, and Kung Fu.