Spooks volumes

the fact that Simon Yam Tat-wah would prefer a world without ghosts. Strange things happened on the set near the end of the eight-day shoot for his directorial debut, the opening segment of the Hong Kong horror triptych Tales from the Dark.

The elder of twin sisters acting in the film claimed to have seen a man with a pig's head standing next to Yam while he was watching the playback on the monitor. "We burned incense and it quickly went away, but pretty soon it was back," the 58-year-old actor-director recalls. "That was the first and only supernatural encounter of my life."

Yam, an atheist, intermittently returns to the experience throughout the interview. "The elder sister was always tired on the set, whereas the younger one was always energetic," he recalls, seemingly oblivious to the common Chinese belief that people being haunted often feel physically drained. "This made me think that, because she was tired, she was experiencing blurred vision. I thought that she was probably having illusions."

The unexpected encounter provided a suitable footnote to the Tales from the Dark project. Yam decided to get involved with the two-part ghost story series after a personal invitation from Hong Kong writer Lillian Lee Pik-wah - whose stories have been adapted for movies including Rouge, Farewell My Concubine and Dumplings. The second instalment will be screened in August.

It was an uncharacteristic career move by the veteran, who has more than 200 acting credits under his belt. Yam claims that he does not like the genre and can't remember the last time he watched a ghost movie.

"I kept one thing in the back of my mind while I was making this movie," he says. "I believe in UFOs and, although I don't watch ghost movies, I believe in the supernatural because many things that have happened are impossible to explain."