In a world of Elevated Horror, Intelligent Horror, Woke Horror and horror that desperately wants to be ‘of the moment’, there’s a definite pleasure to be had from seeing a film that does not hold both the genre and its audience in thinly-veiled contempt. The joys of Mr Vampire are, for the most part, lightweight and disposable, and are all the better for that.
Ironically, back in the day, Mr Vampire was – somewhat accidentally – revolutionary stuff. Horror has long been a global industry, but it’s fair to say that few Hong Kong genre movies had made it to the West beyond those caught up in the 1970s martial arts craze, until a handful of movies – A Chinese Ghost Story, Zu Warriors of the Magic Mountain and this one being at the forefront – broke through to find a whole new audience who were understandably dazzled by their originality. Alongside the bullet ballet films of directors like John Woo, Chinese horror felt unlike anything that we’d seen before – visually beautiful, dynamic, breathlessly fast-paced and with a winning combination of action, humour and melodrama, this new generation of films (one that was just as groundbreaking in Hong Kong, to be fair) felt like a breath of fresh air in a genre that was, at the time, becoming increasingly stale and directionless.
Mr Vampire was the pioneer of the movement – a 1985 hit in Hong Kong that spawned several sequels, spin-offs and imitators, it was a shot in the arm for the Hong Kong film industry and set the template for many films to come. It’s a hugely important film because of what it helped spawn, but of course, ‘important’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘good’. Many a film – many an Eighties film in particular – can feel clumsy and lacklustre when watched again, especially if you are to take the rose-tinted glasses of youth off. Thankfully, this is not the case here – watching the film again for the first time since the early 1990s, I was struck by just how well it holds up, even after years of glossier, faster-paced Hong Kong movies.
The film follows the adventures of Master Kau (Lam Ching-ying), an expert on the supernatural and burial master, who – along with his buffoonish students Man Choi (Ricky Hui) and Chou (Chin Siu-Ho) are tasked with re-burying an unquiet corpse. Unfortunately for them, the corpse turns out to be a vampire, who is soon causing chaos as it rampages through the locale, trying to vampirise his granddaughter (Moon Lee).
This is the film that introduced Western audiences to the idea of the hopping vampire, a distinctly Chinese variation on the undead, and that – alongside the very localised methods of combating the overly active corpse, including the use of sticky rice and magic spells – still feels fresh now. The vampires here are arguably sometimes more like zombies (especially the animated corpses that Master Lau and his associates transport around), but the titular character is both comedic and creepy. And that’s a good way to describe the film as a whole – this is a horror comedy, and the humour is often very broad. Hong Kong films didn’t, by and large, go for subtle humour, and if you don’t like slapstick, wild facial mugging and exaggerated hysteria, then this might not be for you. But it works within the story, where everything is somewhat over-the-top, and doesn’t feel contrived in the way that some of its Western contemporaries do. This is a film that revels in its silliness and pokes affectionate fun at both Chinese folklore and the martial arts film tradition, while still knowing when to play things straight – there are moments of suspense and relentless threat, as well as a hauntingly sweet subplot involving a romantic ghost.
The most significant aspect of Mr Vampire, when seen again, is just how fresh it feels. Despite the hopping vampire being run into the ground by countless films, this still works remarkably well. It’s not a film that tries to do anything other than entertain, and it does that very well indeed. Life is currently grim enough and there’s a lot to be said for a film that doesn’t leave you feeling worse after you’ve seen it. This is joyful, charming and – in the best way possible – pleasingly throwaway, and all the more worthwhile because of that. Hop to it!
Mr Vampire is available now from Eureka! For more information, click here.