Seeing how Asian cities allow the supernatural to surround us made me realize how much we differ from the West. K. Ancuta uses the multi-apartment building as an example, which houses a great number of tenants that come and go. The interior tends to be eerie with narrow alleyways, never-ending flats beside each other, small windows and doors, and staircases that lead nowhere. I found the strategically placed mirrors to be an iconic feature of these haunted buildings. Mirrors are considered as passageways to other dimensions, and also from an interior designing point of view, as illusions of a bigger

Continue readingReading Response: Ancuta, K. (2020)

The part portraying Hong Kong as a ghostly space impressed me greatly. I didn’t relate politics to ghost stories or places before. Usually, when I watch ghost films, I only focus on the appearance of the ghost or the manipulation of light and darkness, enjoying the excitement and the ambiance brought by watching horror movies and watching those scenes at a superficial level. I never thought that an unheimlich house can be a metaphor for Hong Kong in the tense Hong Kong – China relationship in a specific period. The director ingeniously combines horror and politics these two seems like unrelated

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The author finds this strong link between ghost stories and the urban city in Asian context, this seemed like a new perspective for me as I usually see horror tropes of isolated suburban setting where the protagonist gets threatened while having no one to ask for help. The alternate trope is finding the uncanny out of the familiar. Chinese ghosts are special for they are built upon the cultural notions of Buddhist karmic cycle, Confucian ideals and Taoist rituals. Therefore, they are often seen as human beings in their afterlife lingering on earth for they were unfulfilled. As sociable beings,

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In Hong Kong filming industry, lots of classic ghost-themed films are born, and one of the famous directors, Fruit Chan, has done a good job of it. Hong Kong is the birthland of most Chinese ghost films, as “ghost culture” is a traditional cultural issue that kind of life-form. In most of the film, the idea of “loneliness” is significant to show the isolation and interaction between the living environment and ghosts, which recall our attention to the social issue. In this reading, the writer detailly explained Fruit Chan’s films. For “Made in Hong Kong”, is one of three films

Continue reading[Reading Response] – In Search of the Ghostly in Context

In this book chapter, Esther M. K. Cheung explores how Fruit Chan illustrates the ghostly context in his movies. After reading this chapter, I have gained some interesting insights about the roles of ghosts and housing estates in Chan’s films. Speaking of the roles of ghosts, they are allegorizations of recalcitrant elements of the past that resist erasure. In Chan’s movies, ghosts persist doggedly in the space that they do not belong to because they have some stories to tell. Also, ghosts act as a metaphor for the struggles faced by Hong Kong. From my point of view, Chan tries

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  From the extra knowledge I learned, in the early 1980s, due to the influence of Hong Kong’s “New Wave” reform and innovation, Hong Kong horror films began to learn from and use foreign culture for innovation and breakthrough, forming a “new wave” of horror films different from the traditional. By setting up a closed and depressed environment in the film, the directors render bloody and violent pictures, depict universal characters and use close-up shots, making the “New Wave” horror films at this time show prominent “cosmopolitan” characteristics in the artistic style. In the mid-1980s, Hong Kong people’s psychological demands

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Hong Kong’s historical and political background could explain the vast amount of ghost films in Hong Kong. British colonized Hong Kong for more than 140 years. When Hong Kong was about to return to China in 1997, many Hong Kong people were filled with anxiety and distrust of China and the future. They are uncertain about Hong Kong’s identity, system, order and borders. This fear was expressed in the movie as the fear of ghosts. An example is A CHINESE GHOST STORY. The director used four characters as a metaphor for the complex relationship between Hong Kong, China and the United Kingdom,

Continue readingReading Response: Cheung, E. M. K.