Hong Kong horror cinema, from kung fu ghost movies to adults-only shockers like the human flesh eaters of The Untold Story
- Ghost films in 1950s Hong Kong weren’t about ghosts at all. Sammo Hung created authentic Cantonese horror by mixing jokes, action and Chinese superstition
- The advent of Category III films for adults only saw the rise of truly nasty fare, from true-crime slashers like Dr Lamb to cannibalism in The Untold Story
As for horror, cheap copies of American movies were produced in the early 1970s to ride on the success of the international mega-hit The Exorcist. But seriously nasty shockers such as The Untold Story, which featured Anthony Wong Chau-san as a crazy food vendor who served up human flesh in his pork buns, didn’t become an industry staple until the early 1990s.
Why the delay? Ingrained Confucian values and a desire to educate the population about the perils of superstition meant that the Cantonese ghost films of the 1950s and 1960s weren’t really ghost films at all – the ghostly events always had a rational explanation, and the so-called ghosts were usually humans in disguise.
For instance, in 1957’s The Nightly Cry of the Ghost, the supposed ghost turns out be a human girl posing as a spook to scare the people who murdered her family into giving a confession.
“Many of the ghost movies of the traditional Cantonese cinema of the 1950s and 1960s were psychological, didactic films using the idea of ghosts to impart a materialistic point of view,” wrote Cheng Yu in an essay entitled “Under a Spell”. “Such movies were invariably anti-superstition, preaching the non-existence of ghosts.