Hop on pop: jiangshi films in a transnational context

CineAction, Winter, 2009 by Stephanie Lam

On e How.com, an instructional website with the tagline "How to Do just About Everything," one finds the following article: "How to Defeat a Chinese Hopping Vampire." Listed are 5 easy steps for anyone who should encounter such a being. They are as follows:

1. Pin a spell to the vampire's forehead. This spell should be written in chicken's blood, on a piece of thin yellow paper. This will subdue them.

2. Fend them off with a Ba-qua mirror, which is an 8-sided mirror often used in Feng Shui. Reflect the light in their direction, and they will beat a retreat.

3. Attack them with a sword made of lucky Chinese coins. This sword must first be charged, which is done by placing it in the light of a full moon.

4. Freeze them in place with a dab of blood to the forehead.

5. Fling sticky rice at them. The sticky rice will draw out the evil, banishing them. (1)

Aside from such instructional texts on how to defeat a Chinese Hopping Vampire, more elaborate internet fan sites and discussion threads exist devoted specifically to describing the jiangshi's origins, its similarities to and differences from Western vampires and the most effective way to combat one. Such factoids are gleaned from close readings of Hong Kong produced jiangshi dianying or "cadaver movies," and the films themselves are consolidated into a canon of sorts by enthusiasts. Fans of jiangshi films are quick to point out that the term "Hopping Vampire" is in fact a misnomer. The jiangshi is technically not of the same ilk as a Western vampire in that it does not feed on blood but rather seeks to absorb qi or life force from humans. More accurately, according to Chinese folklore, they are the revenants or reanimated corpses of those who were either improperly buried or died unusually cruel deaths. Although one could go on to speak at more length about the jiangshi's features, its strengths and weakness and its place in a supernatural order, the more salient point to emphasize is that the figure of the jiangshi was only brought fully into the Chinese popular imaginary through Hong Kong films of the 1980s and 90s. The use of the descriptive term "vampire," Stephen Teo notes, was a decision made by Hong Kong publicists for marketing purposes. (2) No doubt this label is precisely what draws a comparative impulse in both Chinese and Western viewers. Due to the jiangshi film's peripheral point of origin, its lo-fi aesthetic and its eclectic mixing of genres, the films enjoy considerable cult status in the West, where discourse has tended to fixate on the body of the vampire as a curiosity both familiar and strange.

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It is precisely the body of the jiangshi that is of interest to me, for in its hybrid and liminal status, it is in many ways a perfect vehicle for the exploration of Hong Kong identity. While jiangshi films circulate globally as mass entertainment, these films also speak to particular local sentiments regarding cultural location and ethnicity. Ackbar Abbas and Stephen Teo have looked at the ways in which Hong Kong cinema of the late 1980s and 1990s turned to questions of identity, nationality and ethnicity as a way of working through anxieties spurred by the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984. As Teo notes, during and after the period of negotiation "'a China syndrome' began to develop in the territory, colouring perceptions of kinship and cultural affinity with undertones of political anxiety and fear." (3) Young Hong Kong filmmakers, while acknowledging the influence of Western cinematic traditions, also began tracing the roots of Hong Kong cinema in the Shanghai films of the 30s and in even older Chinese literary and theatre traditions. Responding to the pending handover in 1997, Hong Kong cinema of this period was marked by intense exploration and identification with an imagined Chinese heritage. The Chinese influence, writes Teo, "began to manifest itself as an identification with China as the source of one's culture and language, a kind of abstract nationalism that while registering it, bypassed fear and loathing for the communist regime as well as for aspects of the colonial, laissez-faire capitalism which ruled Hong Kong and Taiwan." (4) I argue that while the jiangshi film, a quirky hybrid of kung fu, horror and slapstick comedy has considerable global appeal, it also serves as a medium for exploring the specific concerns of a local Hong Kong populace.

In order to think through the multiple ways in which the body of the jiangshi signifies within a Chinese popular imaginary as a vehicle for negotiating cultural identity, I will examine three films: Mr. Vampire/jianshi Xiansheng (Hung, Hong Kong 1985), The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (Baker, Britain and Hong Kong 1974), and The Cods Must Be Crazy III, also known as Crazy Safari/Fei Zhou He Sheng (Chan, Hong Kong 1996). Specifically, I am interested in how one might read these popular texts allegorically as reflections of real historic and desired geopolitical relations. Taking Arjun Appadurai's view of the "imagination as social practice," I will examine how these films, in their movements through local and transnational circuits, reimagine relations between individual and national bodies. According to Appadurai, "the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work, and a form of negotiation between sites of agency and globally defined fields of possibility. ..." (5) Each of these films map out a unique topography of social relations between fictitious sites of agency, and it is the figure of the vampire--as archetype and pop cultural icon--that allows for a negotiation between these sites.