Gary Bettinson - Hong Kong Horror Cinema

Hong Kong Horror Cinema

For Paul & Lucie, and Ian & Eileen

Hong Kong Horror Cinema

Edited by Gary Bettinson and Daniel Martin

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editorial matter and organisation Gary Bettinson and Daniel Martin, 2018
the chapters their several authors, 2018

Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4744 2461 5

The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Daniel would like to thank colleagues in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at KAIST for their support of this project. The students of HSS217 in the autumn semester of 2016 are also due thanks for being so receptive to some ideas-in-progress on fantasy-horror, and for their thoughtful responses to films screened. Particular gratitude for their friendship and encouragement is due to Grant Fisher, Mark Morris and Mark Jancovich. Adoring distractions were provided, as always, by Hyunjoo, Montgomery and Errol; final thanks to Youngsook Ryu for providing immeasurably helpful bouts of babysitting.

Gary would like to thank Law Kar, Li Cheuk-to, Yvonne Teh, Bey Logan, Wing-Ho Lin, Timmy Chen, Yiping Lin, Kristof Van den Troost and Richard Rushton. Appreciation goes to Victor Fan and an audience at Kings College London for their hospitality and insightful comments on horror cinema. Pang Ho-cheung gave generously of his time, deftly assisted by Veronica Bassetto. Special thanks are due to Robert and Shirley.

We would both like to thank our editor at Edinburgh University Press, Gillian Leslie, for her constant encouragement and enthusiasm for this project.

Lastly, we thank Eddie Clark for editorial support, and Lel Gillingwater for attentive copy-editing.

Gary Bettinson is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Lancaster University. He is the author of The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai: Film Poetics and the Aesthetic of Disturbance (2015), editor of the Directory of World Cinema: China Volumes 1 and 2 (2012; 2015), co-author (with Richard Rushton) of What is Film Theory? An Introduction to Contemporary Debates (2010), co-editor (with James Udden) of The Poetics of Chinese Cinema (2016) and co-editor (with Tan See Kam) of Asian Cinema.

Felicia Chan is Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Manchester, researching the construction of national, cultural and cosmopolitan imaginaries in film. She is also author of Cosmopolitan Cinema: Cross-cultural Encounters in East Asian Film (2017), co-editor of Chinese Cinemas: International Perspectives (2016) and founding member of the Chinese Film Forum UK.

Kenneth Chan is Professor of English and Director of Film Studies at the University of Northern Colorado. He is the author of Remade in Hollywood: the Global Chinese Presence in Transnational Cinemas (2009) and Yonfans Bugis Street (2015). His essays have also appeared in numerous edited book collections and academic journals, including Cinema Journal, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Asian Cinema, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture and Camera Obscura. His latest research focuses on the fantastic in contemporary global cinemas.

David Scott Diffrient is Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at Colorado State University. His articles have been published in Asian Cinema, Cinema Journal, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Journal of Film and Video, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and other journals. He is the author of Omnibus Films: Theorizing Transauthorial Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and the co-author of Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema (2015). He recently served as the co-editor of the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema.

Andrew Grossman is the editor of the anthology Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade, a regular contributor to Bright Lights Film Journal and Popmatters, and a contributor to numerous edited collections, including Movies in the Age of Obama, Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and the Ethics of Failure, and Clint Eastwoods Cinema of Trauma. He is currently co-editing (with Brian Bergen-Aurand) The Encyclopedia of Queer Cinema. He also directed a documentary film, Not That Kind of Christian!! (2007), which was featured at the Montreal World Film Festival.

Enrique Ajuria Ibarra is Assistant Professor at Universidad de las Amricas Puebla, Mexico. He has previously published several articles and book chapters on Gothic and horror cinema. He is the editor of the peer-reviewed online journal Studies in Gothic Fiction, and is currently preparing a monograph on the relationship between movement, Gothic and the horror film.

Vivian Lee is Associate Professor at the City University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997: the Post-nostalgic Imagination (2009; Chinese translation to be published in 2018) and editor of East Asian Cinemas: Regional Flows and Global Transformations (2011). Her current research interests include East Asian cinemas and visual cultures, cultural policy and the politics of heritage-making in Greater China and Asia. A co-authored volume on Hong Kong independent cinema and a book-length study on Hong Kongs left-wing studios are due to be published in 2018.

Liang Luo is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China (2014). Her recent writings on intermediality, the politics of performance, and the dialectics of dancing and writing can be seen in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Trans-humanities, and Frontiers of Literary Studies in China. She is working on two projects, The Humanity of the Non-human: Gender, Media, and Politics in The White Snake (book and digital project) and The International Avant-Garde and Modern China (book and documentary film project).

Daniel Martin is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). His recent research concerns the international circulation of films from South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong. He is the author of Extreme Asia: the Rise of Cult Cinema from the Far East (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), co-editor of Korean Horror Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), and has published articles in Cinema Journal, The Journal of Film and Video, Continuum, Film International, Acta Koreana, Asian Cinema and The Journal of Korean Studies.

Lisa Odham Stokes teaches Humanities and Film Studies at Seminole State College in Central Florida. She is co-author (with Michael Hoover) of