A Chinese Ghost Story (1987)
By the mid-1980s, Hong Kong cinema was operating at a kind of creative fever pitch that the rest of the world was only just beginning to notice. John Woo had redefined the action thriller with A Better Tomorrow in 1986, and the Shaw Brothers tradition of wuxia spectacle, stretching back to landmark pictures like Come Drink with Me, had left a generation of filmmakers with a shared visual language of swordplay, wirework, and operatic melodrama. It was into this particular moment that A Chinese Ghost Story arrived in 1987, loosely adapted from "Nie Xiaoqian", a tale from Pu Songling's seventeenth-century short story collection Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. The source material had already been filmed once before, in a 1960 Shaw Brothers production, but this version had no interest in period restraint. Producer Tsui Hark, one of the key architects of the Hong Kong New Wave, brought his characteristic appetite for excess to the project, and what emerged was something considerably stranger and more kinetic than a straightforward ghost romance had any right to be.
The film was directed by Tony Ching Siu-Tung, who had made his name as one of Hong Kong's most inventive action choreographers and had already demonstrated considerable flair behind the camera with Duel to the Death (1983). Here, working with Tsui Hark's Film Workshop alongside Cinema City and Golden Princess, he brings a genuinely restless visual energy to the material, keeping the camera in near-constant motion and staging action sequences with the kind of athletic, gravity-optional physicality that would eventually find its way to global audiences through films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The budget was modest by Western standards, which shows in places, but Ching and his team compensate with sheer invention. At 95 minutes, the film wastes very little time on ceremony. Leading the cast is Leslie Cheung, already a significant pop and screen star in Hong Kong, playing the hapless tax collector Ning Caichen with a winning, self-deprecating charm that keeps the film grounded even when the supernatural mayhem threatens to overwhelm everything around him. Opposite him, Joey Wong brings a quiet, melancholy grace to Nie Xiaoqian, the ghost at the story's romantic centre, a performance that is polished but unremarkable on paper and yet somehow quietly affecting in practice. Wu Ma provides considerable colour as the sword-wielding, poetry-chanting Taoist monk Yen, a character who might have felt ridiculous in less committed hands but who becomes one of the film's genuine pleasures.
Tony Ching Siu-Tung’s 1987 cult classic A Chinese Ghost Story, is a curious, wildly entertaining beast. The film is a glorious, chaotic mashup that feels like it’s constantly shifting gears: it’s got parts Wuxia, parts Xianxia, and plenty of moments where you’re just sitting there thinking, "What the hell am I watching?" It’s a brilliantly bonkers experience that undoubtedly paved the way for the gravity-defying, crazy wire work we’d later see in global masterpieces like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
When it comes to its cinematic DNA, the movie is a fascinating melting pot of Eastern and Western influences. I’m sure it must have taken some heavy inspiration from the manic, possession-heavy energy of The Evil Dead franchise, while also sharing a lot of the supernatural, action-comedy DNA of Big Trouble in Little China. The story itself is a similar mixed pot, throwing elements of genuine horror, slapstick comedy, and sweeping romance all into a blender and hoping for the best. I will say, however, that it is undeniably a rough film. The picture quality feels so much older than 1987, and the stop-motion effects used for the undead monsters are really, really bad by today’s standards.
But you know what? That’s exactly what makes it so charming. You just have to embrace the sheer, unadulterated madness of it all and let the brilliant performances from the likes of Leslie Cheung carry you through the technical hiccups. Despite its obvious, glaring flaws, it is an absolute one-of-a-kind experience that oozes character and cinematic ambition. It’s a wild, colourful ride that leaves you grinning at the sheer originality of it all, at least until I finally get around to watching the sequels!
A Chinese Ghost Story is a beautifully flawed, highly original piece of 80s Hong Kong cinema that is well worth a watch for the sheer, unfiltered fun of it.
A Chinese Ghost Story sits in a particular pocket of late-1980s world cinema that rewards exactly the right kind of patience, the willingness to meet a film on its own chaotic terms rather than the ones you arrived with. It belongs to a tradition of Hong Kong genre filmmaking that was cheerfully, almost aggressively unconcerned with Western critical categories, mixing horror, romance, comedy, and wire-fu action with the confidence of people who simply did not see those things as separate concerns. Macca's take here reflects something that comes up again and again when revisiting films of this era and region: the technical roughness and the sheer ambition are not in competition with each other, they are, more often than not, the same thing. If this kind of organised, gloriously untidy filmmaking appeals, it is well worth rooting around in the broader Hong Kong catalogue of the period. Films like this one do not get made by accident, and they rarely get made twice.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1987 | Watched: 2026-07-02
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) on YouTube
Where to watch
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