Hong Kong martial arts cinema: why Leslie Cheung had to be talked into making 1987 Tsui Hark classic A Chinese Ghost Story
- Leslie Cheung, who starred opposite Joey Wong, had to be convinced by Tsui to take part in a period film
- The film combined special effects and martial arts to reinvent the Chinese ghost genre
A Chinese Ghost Story is one exuberant movie. A wildly innovative mix of ghosts, martial arts and romance, all swathed in maniacal special effects, the film revived international interest in Hong Kong films after it was released in 1987.
At home, although it didn’t make the annual box-office top 10, A Chinese Ghost Story breathed new life into the ghost film genre which had dominated Hong Kong screens earlier in the decade.
Produced by Tsui Hark and directed by Tony Ching Siu-tung, a long-time stuntman and martial arts choreographer with two films as director under his belt at that point, A Chinese Ghost Story established a working relationship between the two men that would result in the phenomenally successful Swordsman wuxia films of the early 1990s.
The script, which Tsui conceived and Yuen Kai-chi wrote, is lightly etched, but highly effective. Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing plays Ning, a young tax collector who falls in love with an elusive young woman named Tsing (Joey Wong Choi-yin).
After witnessing his new love narrowly escape from slaughter at the hands of the Taoist ghost hunter Yin (played by the late martial arts director/actor Wu Ma), Ning realises she is not of this world.