![]() ![]() After a spell induces a jiangshi to mirror all of Cheung’s movements, the pair puts on a copycat homage to the Marx brothers’ classic bit from Duck Soup in a lineage of influence later including Sam Raimi, who borrowed a severed-hand gag for Evil Dead 2. The philanderers send a legion of cold-blooded minions after him, though the typically episodic, threadbare plot mostly serves to line up feats of physical talent in both combat and humor. Sammo Hung, an unconventional leading man with his soft chin and a scar picked up from a broken Coke bottle in a street fight, directed himself as Bold Cheung, a kindly yet guileless fighting ace cucked by his wife with his employer. The jiangshi film wouldn’t reach maturity until 1980 with Encounters of the Spooky Kind, the first to foreground the hopping menace as the fulcrum of a story rather than accessory to it. Advertised as “Filmed entirely on location in Hong Kong!” 1974’s The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires grafted the Shaw Brothers’ peerless martial arts prowess onto the Hammer Film model in an international co-production that saw director Roy Ward Baker regularly going berserk on day-wage actors who couldn’t understand his instructions. 1936’s Midnight Vampire piggybacked on the popularity of the just-imported Dracula with a Europeanized villain, and that same year, Wuye Jiangshi saw the creatures as a hasty resolution to a family drama about greedy heirs. The vampire had prowled Chinese fiction in various iterations as far back as the 18th century, first in Pu Songling’s supernatural anthology Liaozhai Zhiyi, a spiritual ancestor to The Twilight Zone in its pointed societal critiques via short-form suspense. More than delirious treats for obscurity enthusiasts, these wild films stand today as telling artifacts from a nation in political and cultural flux, negotiating tensions between religion and secularism, tradition and modernity, East and West. A five-title collection now streaming on the Criterion Channel gathers some tough-to-find choice cuts from a canon that combined hallucinatory experiments with color, surreal slapstick, blistering kung fu, and innovative in-camera effects simulating the soul’s passage in and out of the body. Most significantly, the jiangshi film continued the vampire’s collision of a medieval past with an unfamiliar present, as relics decked out in the hanfu wardrobe of the Qing dynasty rose again to bound through a booming, industrialized Hong Kong. The stock baddies added their own mythos of physical attributes (pallid blue-green skin, with appearances ranging from the monstrous to the otherwise ordinary) and weaknesses (glutinous rice, hens’ eggs, sheets of paper inscribed with talismans) to a long literary heritage of bloodsuckers overlapping here with the regional folklore of China. ![]() (They have to jump around, you see, because of the rigor mortis “jiangshi” translates from Mandarin as “stiff corpse.”) These Chinese vampires didn’t turn into bats, they rarely had fangs, and they were often described as ghosts, but there’s unmistakable vampiric DNA in their parasitic feeding on qi, the energy of the soul. Through the 1980s and ’90s, a bizarre microgenre of lucrative oddities took shape around the undead ghouls referred to as “hopping vampires” in the English-speaking world for their distinctively goofy means of hopscotch-style locomotion. Vampire and many of the other gonzo horror-comedy-action mashups collected under the umbrella of jiangshi cinema. This battle was just another day at the office around Golden Harvest, the Hong Kong film factory responsible for Mr. Her head then detaches itself from her neck, flies across the room, and gives a theatrical snarl. When she snaps back up, her static-shocked hair stands on end like the quills of a porcupine. The succubus - who has taken the form of a beautiful human woman with a popped-out eyeball bulging out of a mass of loose brain - recoils in pain and bends down out of frame. A Taoist priest grapples with a demon, using a lightning-emitting dagger to slice the chain wrapped around his neck. ![]()
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