I will never forget the first time I saw Mr. Vampire. I was sitting around being silly with a bunch of friends and someone put the movie on in the background. A few minutes in, someone said, “oh my God, y’all, did you see that?” We ran back the tape to see Man (Ricky Hui) eat some of Wai’s (Billy Lau) hair and proceed to take control of his body until Wai has stripped off and made a complete ass of himself in front of his beautiful cousin Ting (Moon Lee).We just about pissed ourselves laughing and watched it several more times. No movie (and almost no thing, full stop) has consistently made me as happy for as many years as Mr. Vampire. And so from that inauspicious beginning was born my fifteen year (and continuing) obsession with Hong Kong movies.
Possibly the best element of Asian horror is the very thing which makes American versions of these movies fail: you don’t have to spend half to two-thirds of the movie watching a bunch of people argue about whether something supernatural is going on. The characters are aware of and trying to fight the monsters from the beginning. I can’t even imagine an American Mr. Vampire. It would be like Ernest P. Worrell and the Ghostbusters Versus Police Academy but with fewer sequels. My God, can you imagine Bill Murray out-smartassing Steve Guttenberg while the undead corpse of Jim Varney accidentally exposes the corrupt schemes of a united G. W. Bailey and William Atherton? Me neither.
I’m not sure if Mr. Vampire really caused the Hong Kong horror industry to take the goofy tone it maintained until the Pang brothers came along to scare the crap out of us, but it certainly was a major factor. While the bumbling friends Man and Chau (Chin Siu-ho) provide plenty of laughs for the audience, it seems that the various curses, hopping undead, and even the succubus they’re supposed to be helping Master Kau (Lam Ching-ying) work against are serious business.
I can’t say that all the people of Hong Kong are or were superstitious; however, it does seem that things like fortune tellers are more prevalent and/or acceptable in that culture, or were at one time. I think that’s why Mr. Vampire is such a favorite to me: it has occult elements that are fascinating to me because of their novelty. On top of that is good quality slapstick humor, which is funny in any language. Slapstick may be the real international language, despite what Ricky’s mom said in Better off Dead.
The only thing I don’t understand is this: why does Priest Four Eyes (Anthony Chan) have a herd of hopping vampires? Maybe I could find out if Netflix would stock Mr. Vampire 2 and 3. (This does not excure me for not tracking these movies down between 1996 and now, but I need a scapegoat.) That reminds me, if you haven’t seen this one, order it from Netflix now, because they seem to be taking stuff off their list at an alarming rate. I promise to do my part and send this copy back tomorrow.
Em Savidge said:
Martial arts and slapstick? Count me in! I rented this (for the first time) just recently. Helluva lot of fun! The cultural differences are part of what make these (and any “foreign” film, as far as I’m concerned) so interesting. Who knew that vampires couldn’t detect you if you held your breath? I just know that I want to watch more hopping vampires now. Any recommendations?
And, yeah, no kidding about Netflix. When I tried to continue watching Onibaba a few nights ago, it was gone. Guess it serves me right for waiting so damned long to finally see it. But… damn, Netflix!
Wednesday's Child said:
I think there are a lot of bad hopping vampire movies out there. One of the best similar good quality movies I know of is Encounter of the Spooky Kind with Sammo Hung. The choreography in that one is stunning.
I was loath to point out that my fascination with Hong Kong movies is based in an enjoyment of cultural differences, but that has to be part of it. I finally admitted it in this article, however awkwardly and apologetically. (As you know, people in America are quick to label someone a racist for daring to point out that different cultures are different.) Thinking about Mr. Vampire in that way reminds me of the time my parents and I drove over an hour to see a showing of the Italian movie of Bread and Tulips. When it was over, my mom accused my dad and me of only liking it because it was Italian, saying we would have turned up our noses had the same movie been made in America, and I had to privately wonder if she was right. But now that we have had so many remakes of Asian horror movies flop in America because they simply don’t translate, I wonder if there is something about Italian movies that is uniquely Italian too. Even when the Italians were making all those dubbed horror movies in the 70s and 80s and trying to pass them off as American movies there was a different character about the movies than the American slashers of the same era. So basically, Bread and Tulips would never in it’s current form have existed in America, for reasons I can’t quite explain.
Christianne Benedict said:
I totally dig Mr. Vampire. It’s the movie that I love to point to whenever I articulate the unspoken rule of Hong Kong horror: the bad guy is NEVER dead until he explodes!
Wednesday's Child said:
Ooo, I like that rule! If it was applied in American slashers things would be quite different.
Yaoguai said:
Mr. Vampire is fantastic. 2 is trash, three is excellent, four is good, Magic Cop (sometimes called Mr. Vampire 5) is excellent, as is Ultimate Vampire, Exorcist Master, and Vampire vs. Vampire.
Mr. Vampire was a novel before it was a film. The novelist Huáng Yīng, best known for a series of ultraviolent wǔxiá novels that were adapted into Shaw Brothers films, wrote a second, related novel. That novel was turned into the movie The First Vampire in China, which follows Mr. Vampire’s “rules” of Dào magic more closely than any of the other “spirit magic kung fu” films. Blood of a black dog? Check. Sticky rice? Got it. Spool of string that extends over an ink cup? Yep.
I am quicker than anyone I know to cry “racism,” but nothing you’ve said or done here sets off my sirens. You are interested because it’s different, yes, but you are also interested because you sense there’s material you don’t understand. I don’t see you rushing to squish the movie’s portrayal of superstition into an easy box from which to assert subtle cultural superiority.
Euro-vampires dislike sunlight, wooden stakes, crosses, and garlic — things that symbolize the home and hearth, the familiar, the daytime world. Within that superstition is contained a lore of the European villages — when threatened by the unknown, confront it with the familiar.
When I saw Mr. Vampire for the first time, amidst the entertaining, high-energy fun of the movie, I saw a number of cultural signifiers I just didn’t understand, and so I was driven to learn about them. One has a sense of encountering something; you know it makes sense to someone with a different background, and you’re curious about that background.
For a number of cultures, recovering the traditional folklore is an activity full of nationalism. After Japan lost the war in the Pacific, a Japanese veteran named Shigeru Mizuki made it his mission to rediscover and popularize Japan’s folkloric monsters, the yōkai. The animated Thai film, Nak, reclaims scary ghost Nang Nak and turns her into a cartoon heroine. Norway’s Trollhunter. And on and on.
Wednesday's Child said:
Wow, that was a very informative comment. How cool is all that extra info? Thanks for adding so much to the post! Good rundown on the Vampire series too, so I know which installments to try to watch next.