How Sammo Hung sparked the kung fu horror comedy genre with Encounter of the Spooky Kind

Actor who had trained with Jackie Chan cemented his rise up the career ladder of Hong Kong film with 1980 hit that launched a new genre of martial arts film

Directed and co-written by Hung, the story of a braggart who ends up pitted against magically reanimated corpses in a haunted house was grounded in Chinese myth

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Sammo Hung (right) and Huang Ha in a still from Encounter of the Spooky Kind (1980). The success of the film, which Hung directed and co-wrote, made him a player in Hong Kong cinema.

Published: 7:00am, 2 Aug 2020Updated: 5:25pm, 3 Aug 2020

Hong Kong cinema is renowned for periodically reinventing itself, and 1980’s Encounter of the Spooky Kind (also known as Spooky Encounter) was another successful attempt to rejuvenate the martial arts genre.

Directed, co-choreographed, and co-written by Sammo Hung Kam-bo, who also stars, the movie brought ghosts, magic, and horror effects to the fading kung fu comedy genre, which had itself reinvigorated martial arts films in the late 1970s.

The result was a big Christmas hit for Hung and production company Golden Harvest. The film’s Taoist magic, along with the coffins and the “bouncing” corpses which are adept at a rigid kind of kung fu, set the tone and style for similar films throughout the following decade.

Notable examples include Wu Ma’s excellent martial arts horror The Dead and the Deadly (1982) and Hung’s own smash-hit Mr Vampire horror comedy series, which he began producing for his own Bo Ho Films production company in 1985.

Hung’s script for Encounter of the Spooky Kind is surprisingly tight. He plays “Courageous” Cheung, a braggart who discovers that his wife is having an affair with local bigwig Master Tam (Huang Ha).

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