Frightfully entertaining
When it comes to horror, Asia's filmmakers and moviegoers prefer the home-spawned variety
Leong Po-chih had already given audiences enough creeps to last a lifetime when the possibility of working in the horror genre reared its head again - and, like many of the characters in such films, the director couldn't resist the temptation of heading back into the darkness.
Leong has spent plenty of time figuring out exactly what frightens us all: producing the neon-drenched slasher antics of Sylvia Chang Ai-chia and Simon Yam Tat-wah in a very Hong Kong - and a very 1980s - He Lives By Night (1982), presenting Jude Law as a vampire who almost has a conscience in the award-winning The Wisdom of Crocodiles (1998), and turning Judd Nelson into a serial killer in 2000's made-for-TV Cabin by the Lake.
Many countries in Asia have these traditions that are full of stories of karma, evil intentions, demons and spirits
However, for his latest effort, the director was searching for something a little different. And so Leong's Baby Blues arrives this Halloween in full-blown 3-D and with the director delving into a very Asian horror aesthetic. "The appeal of Asian horror is the unknown," he says. "It's not just a fear of the dark - it's like looking into another world. It's something that is also part of the culture here. Then there is the other type of horror here which is the pure blood type."
From the trailers at least, Baby Blues seems to chart a course between the two with a plot centred around a family that moves into a new house and finds a disturbing-looking doll waiting to do its worst. "What people see in those eyes are their worst fears," the director reveals. "They are their own sins. I think that's unusual."
Searching for the "unusual" is what the history of Asian horror films is all about, from the darkly macabre Japanese offerings of the 1950s and '60s, to the more recent explorations of sheer terror that have emerged again from that nation, as well as South Korea, Thailand and here in Hong Kong.
"There are certain types of horror films. There is the traditional type, which works on fear. That fear of the dark, the fear of the unknown. It's not so much what's in the dark, but what's in your head," Leong says.
"Then there's the other type where it's half scary with its violence and you often don't know whether to laugh or scream. But here in Asia, while people sometimes mix fun and fear, the audiences like real horror."