The author opens up the ghostly city of Chan’s films, shedding light on low-cost public housing estate issues and marginalized society living there. In Chan’s movies, lower-class housing is depicted as haunted and desolate, “evoking ghostliness, melancholy, loss, and nostalgia” in contrast to the promoted positive depiction. These hyper-dense estates with poverty, dysfunctional families, and crimes, remained home to many people, usually powerless with a strong feeling of homelessness.
Chan uses the uncanny to convey this feeling in his films. Ghosts serve as reminders of past history that haunts places and people. Not all of his films directly address characters as ghosts; some simply allude to them, and this incorporation of urban phantasmagoria also fosters defamiliarization. The ghostly context helps us to develop our recognition of common, everyday things such as housing estates, not only shifting them from our familiar perspectives but also bringing awareness to these locations and providing a different portrayal of Hong Kong. The author’s idea supports the necessity for this as he introduces the unchanged history of Hong Kong’s housing issues. He points out that housing estates do not interfere with the modern developing Hong Kong cityscape from the government’s viewpoint and problem remains unaddressed. In other words, it is now so integrated into the city’s vision that it often goes unnoticed.
The continued use of these estates as residences for vulnerable groups in Hong Kong, including the elderly, underprivileged individuals, and immigrants, further accentuates the haunting nature of these housing and social inequality contained in it.