The Shaw Brothers Horror Canon

Movietown at Clearwater Bay was the largest privately owned film studio on earth. Run Run Shaw built it in the early sixties on forty-six acres of Kowloon hillside — sound stages, permanent street sets, a costume warehouse, dormitories where contract actors actually lived, and an in-house acting school feeding the whole thing. At its peak it turned out more than forty features a year. Everyone remembers the kung fu, because the kung fu is what got exported.

The horror is the studio’s private life. Shaw made it constantly through the seventies and early eighties, mostly for the Southeast Asian market, and because those films were never aimed at Western distributors nobody at the studio bothered to make them presentable. What came out is a body of work with no equivalent anywhere: Chinese ghost tradition, Malaysian and Thai sorcery, wuxia choreography, Hammer-style gothic lighting, and a wholly unregulated appetite for insects.

Eleven films below, and a warning attached to the whole list: they will not prepare you for each other. There is no gradual escalation to be found here. A Shaw horror film is either a Ming-dynasty chamber piece about a woman owed an apology or a Thai sorcerer vomiting a crocodile, and the studio saw no contradiction in shipping both in the same quarter.

The elegant beginning

The Enchanting Shadow (1960). Li Han-hsiang directs the studio’s first serious ghost film, from Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio — the seventeenth-century collection that supplies most of the tradition’s plots. A scholar takes lodgings in a ruined temple and falls in love with a woman who turns out to be a ghost enslaved by a tree demon. It played Cannes. The tone is closer to Chinese opera than horror: painted backdrops, formal composition, a melancholy about a woman who cannot rest. Tsui Hark remade it as A Chinese Ghost Story in 1987 and made it faster, and every subsequent version has been chasing Li’s stillness.

The Ghost Story tradition, and what it assumes. Worth pausing on, because the Western viewer arrives with the wrong furniture. In this tradition the ghost is usually a woman with a grievance and a legitimate legal claim; the horror lives in the unpaid debt. Exorcism is bureaucracy — a Taoist priest files the correct paperwork with the correct authority, which is why so many of these films end with a man drawing characters on yellow paper. The scares are procedural, and the emotion is owed to the dead.

The Nanyang black-magic run

The studio’s most distinctive vein came from looking south. Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia had living traditions of sorcery that Hong Kong audiences regarded with fascinated unease, and Shaw mined them for a decade.

Black Magic (1975). Ho Meng-hua’s breakthrough in the mode. A sorcerer for hire brews love charms and curses out of breast milk, corpse oil and worms; a property developer’s romantic entanglements escalate into open magical warfare. It is unusually well made — Ho was a serious craftsman — and it treats the magic as a service industry with a price list, which is a much better idea than anything supernatural in it.

Black Magic 2 (1976). The sequel abandons restraint. Ho brings in a sorcerer who keeps his youth by drinking women’s milk and driving nails into their skulls to raise them as servants, and stages a hospital sequence in which a woman gives birth to a crocodile. The film’s most notorious effect involves a man’s leg, an infestation, and an unbroken shot. It circulates as Revenge of the Zombies, which undersells it.

The Oily Maniac (1976). Ho again, adapting the Malaysian orang minyak legend: a polio-stricken legal clerk inherits an incantation that lets him dissolve into a puddle of oil and reconstitute as a killer. It is a superhero origin story with the sympathy pointed at the monster, and the effects — a man made of black liquid pouring under a door — are achieved with a wetsuit and total commitment.

The Boxer’s Omen (1983). The end of the road and the studio’s most famous horror film by a distance. Kuei Chih-hung sends a Hong Kong gangster to Thailand to avenge his brother and pursue a Buddhist vocation, and by the final reel the film contains a flying severed head trailing its own organs, a crocodile corpse birthing a wizard, a spider woman, ritual vomiting, and a monk battle conducted mostly in the air. It was shot substantially on location in Thailand and Nepal with real monastic access, which is why the delirium sits on top of genuine texture. Nothing else in world cinema looks like it. Watch it last, or first if you want to be honest with yourself about why you are here.

Kuei Chih-hung, the studio’s real horror director

The Killer Snakes (1974). No supernatural content at all, and the nastiest film Shaw made. A humiliated, abused young man discovers he can command snakes and starts using them. Kuei shoots Hong Kong’s tenements as a genuinely squalid place — this is the studio’s one film that looks like it was made outside the walls — and the psychology is closer to Willard by way of Italian crime cinema. Real snakes, in enormous numbers, and the film’s reputation rests on scenes nobody would attempt now.

Corpse Mania (1981). A necrophile stalks a brothel district in 1930s Hong Kong and Kuei films it as a giallo, complete with black gloves, a mystery structure, and maggots in close-up. The lift from Italy is total and the transplant works: the giallo’s obsession with a misread image sits perfectly on a period Chinese murder plot. If you know the giallo canon, you will spend the whole film ticking boxes.

Bewitched (1981). Kuei’s most disciplined. A father murders his own daughter, confesses immediately, and insists he was under a Thai curse — and the film takes the claim seriously, following a policeman to Thailand to test it. The first half is a procedural, the second is sorcery, and the join is where the film gets its power.

The two hybrids

Human Lanterns (1982). Sun Chung’s wuxia-horror crossover and the most beautiful film here. Two rival martial-arts masters compete for prestige; the lantern-maker they commission is a disfigured man with a grudge who is making his lanterns out of people. Sun shoots the killings with a Steadicam prowl and the killer in a skull mask, and the film’s swordplay is legitimate top-tier Shaw choreography. The genre collision produces something neither side could have made alone.

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974). The Hammer co-production, and a genuine curiosity. Roy Ward Baker directs, Peter Cushing plays Van Helsing lecturing in Chungking, and Dracula possesses a Taoist monk to lead seven undead warlords against a village. Hammer supplied the star and the framing; Shaw supplied the stunt team and the choreography, and the result is two studios’ house styles refusing to blend for eighty-nine minutes. It killed Hammer’s Dracula cycle. It is also the earliest sustained argument that Chinese and European undead operate on different physics, and it is a lot more fun than its reputation. The other half of that collision is in Hammer horror and the colourising of the gothic.

Seeding of a Ghost (1983). Yang Chuan’s revenge film, and the closest Shaw came to the Category III sensibility that would arrive five years later. A taxi driver’s wife is assaulted and killed; he pays a sorcerer; the vengeance takes the form of a pregnancy. The final twenty minutes are a full-scale creature sequence achieved with practical effects, latex and no restraint whatsoever.

The honest problem

Two things about this canon need saying plainly, because the enthusiast literature tends to skate past both.

The first is the animals. The Killer Snakes used real snakes in quantities and situations that no production could arrange today, and a number of them plainly do not survive the shoot. The black-magic films are worse in a quieter way: insects, reptiles and small mammals are used as effects throughout, and the studio’s approach to them was the standard approach of Hong Kong production in the seventies, which is to say there was no approach at all. If the Italian cycle’s cruelty is a dealbreaker for you — and it is a defensible position, argued in the nasty business of the Italian cannibal cycle — then Shaw’s horror shelf is not the refuge it is sometimes sold as.

The second is the Nanyang films’ politics. The black-magic cycle is built on a fairly ugly premise: sorcery comes from down there, from Malaysia and Thailand and Indonesia, and it preys on prosperous Hong Kong Chinese who wander too far south. The sorcerers are dark-skinned, rural and unknowable; the victims are urban, modern and Cantonese. Shaw was selling these films back into the same Southeast Asian territories they exoticised, which makes the arrangement stranger rather than better. Bewitched and The Boxer’s Omen complicate it — both send a Chinese protagonist south to be genuinely humbled, and The Boxer’s Omen takes Buddhist practice seriously enough to shoot in real monasteries — and neither cancels the pattern.

Neither problem makes the films unwatchable. Both make the “innocent delirium” framing dishonest, and the delirium is more interesting once you stop pretending it came from nowhere.

The craft nobody credits

The technical argument for these films is the studio system itself. Shaw’s contract crews had shot four hundred wuxia pictures between them, which means the horror films inherited world-class camera operators, a wire team, a costume department with a warehouse, and choreographers who could stage a fight in a single take. A Shaw ghost moves properly because the person playing it trained at the studio’s opera school. A Shaw exorcism has weight because the wire rig lifting the priest was built by people who lifted swordsmen for a living.

The colour is the other inheritance. Shaw shot in Shawscope on Eastmancolor and lit hard, with the saturated primaries the wuxia films needed — and dropped into horror, that palette does something Western horror rarely risks. A Shaw haunting is red and gold and lantern-lit, bright and gorgeous, with the terrible thing fully visible in the middle of the frame. The tradition has no interest in what you cannot see, because the Chinese ghost has a face and a grievance and wants to be looked at.

Production stopped in 1985. Run Run Shaw moved the whole operation into television at TVB, the sound stages emptied, and the negatives sat in a vault until Celestial Pictures restored several hundred of them in the early 2000s — which is why this material exists in decent transfers at all. The lineage carried on outside the walls: the hopping-corpse comedy that took over Hong Kong in the mid-eighties is covered in Mr. Vampire, the hopping corpse comedy classic, its modern elegy in Rigor Mortis, and the unregulated decade that followed the studio’s collapse is in the Category III Hong Kong canon.

Start with Human Lanterns. Then Black Magic 2. Then decide how much you trust me before you press play on The Boxer’s Omen.