On Criterion, I watched A Chinese Ghost Story, a 1987 Hong Kong folklore horror film directed by Ching Siu-Tung and written by Tuen Kai Chi. The film stars Leslie Cheung as a debt collector named Ning Choi-san, who goes to a rural town to collect debts, but is unable to collect the money, especially when his book of debt becomes wet and unreadable, thus allowing a shop owner to claim he doesn't owe money if his name can't be read in it. He is also dodging a group of men trying to capture fugitives for the reward money, putting up the posters of the illustrations of the fugitive up against random men, trying to match them.
With no money and nowhere else to go, Choi-san is told to take shelter at a deserted temple in a forest outside of town, where everyone assumes he will be mauled by wolves on his way there. He meets a beautiful and mysterious woman named Nip Siu-sin (Joey Wong), and immediately falls in love with her. But her secret is that she is a ghost, and she is bound to a demon, the Tree Demoness, who forces her to seduce young men so that the demon can rob them of their lifeforce. She keeps pushing Choi-san away, trying to save him from that same fate, but he is determined to be with her.
Choi-san gets the help of a Taoist priest and swordsman, Yin Chik-ha (Wu Ma), who told him that the people in the temple are ghosts, and Chik-ha wants to banish Siu-sin's spirit because she isn't human and doesn't want Choi-san pining for her. But they work together to save Siu-sin's soul from being bound to the Tree Demoness by moving her remains from the foot of the tree that the demoness resides in, hoping to free her to the afterlife.
I really liked this movie a lot. It was the first of a trilogy, and I liked how it mixed wushu stunt work, folklore, horror, and goofy comedy. It had a lot of influence from The Evil Dead, with the tree demon attacking with her branches, as well as the camera zooming as the POV of the demon racing to attack a frightened victim. I liked the windy effects during the fight scenes, the blue lighting, the stop- motion zombie skeletons, and the romantic love story at the center of the film.
There's a particularly fun sequence where Siu-sin is trying to hide Choi-san in a bath when the demoness and other young ghost women come in, and he keeps peeking out to take breaths of air, and she has to prevent others from seeing him, and the back and forth ultimately leads to an underwater kiss that Siu-Sin does to hide Choi-san, by dipping forward into the water to push him down, and it's very sexy and romantic, one of the standout moments of the film.
Leslie Cheung unfortunately died by suicide at age 46 in 2003, and he was a wonderful actor and singer in Hong Kong and Chinese cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. I heard of him through watching Farewell My Concubine (1993), directed by Chen Kaige, a love triangle story between three young Peking Opera performers (Leung, Zhang Fengyi, and Gong Li) in early to mid-20th century China, and thought it was a stunning and beautifully sad film. I also liked him in Happy Together (1997), a Hong Kong gay romantic drama directed by Wong Kar-wai and starring Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, that felt both very mature and casual at the same time. In a 1992 interview, Cheung stated that "My mind is bisexual. It's easy for me to love a woman. It's also easy for me to love a man, too" and "I believe that a good actor would be androgynous, and ever changing," making him one of the first public figures in Chinese media to come out, being brave and open at that time.
I'm happy I checked this out, and I'll likely watch the sequels too, since I really enjoyed this film a lot.
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