Hong Kong vampire films: anxious imaginings of death and illness

Abstract

ABSTRACT Much of the scholarship on the Hong Kong vampire film has analysed the genre as a type of ghost film, conflating the form of the vampire creature with the concept of the ghost. This paper takes a different approach in analysing the Hong Kong vampire film as a distinct genre. The vampire has a special physicality that is resurrected after death; it is an embodied entity that resembles a human and has developed through a cross-fertilization of Eastern and Western ideas. I explore the genre’s complexity in three ways. Firstly, I analyse its characteristics and cultural sources, placing emphasis on the Chinese vampire that provides the template for the Hong Kong form. Secondly, I examine Hong Kong vampire films through the lens of the imagining of rebirth in the funeral culture of Chinese Taoism. Thirdly, I consider the ‘metaphor of illness’ and the theme of identity crisis. Exploring films from the 1980s and 1990s, this paper shows how Hong Kong people found a way to reimagine rebirth and resurrection aside from the representation of ghosts. Furthermore, it analyzes how the genre represents the anxiety of the collective unconsciousness prior to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong.