The hopping dead
A Taoist priest grapples with a demon, using a lightning-emitting dagger to slice the chain wrapped around his neck. The succubus — who has taken the form of a beautiful human woman with a popped-out eyeball bulging out of a mass of loose brain — recoils in pain and bends down out of frame. When she snaps back up, her static-shocked hair stands on end like the quills of a porcupine. Her head then detaches itself from her neck, flies across the room, and gives a theatrical snarl.
This battle was just another day at the office around Golden Harvest, the Hong Kong film factory responsible for Mr. Vampireand many of the other gonzo horror-comedy-action mashups collected under the umbrella of jiangshicinema. Through the 1980s and ’90s, a bizarre microgenre of lucrative oddities took shape around the undead ghouls referred to as “hopping vampires” in the English-speaking world for their distinctively goofy means of hopscotch-style locomotion. (They have to jump around, you see, because of the rigor mortis; “jiangshi” translates from Mandarin as “stiff corpse.”) These Chinese vampires didn’t turn into bats, they rarely had fangs, and they were often described as ghosts, but there’s unmistakable vampiric DNA in their parasitic feeding on qi, the energy of the soul. The stock baddies added their own mythos of physical attributes (pallid blue-green skin, with appearances ranging from the monstrous to the otherwise ordinary) and weaknesses (glutinous rice, hens’ eggs, sheets of paper inscribed with talismans) to a long literary heritage of bloodsuckers overlapping here with the regional folklore of China.
Most significantly, the jiangshi film continued the vampire’s collision of a medieval past with an unfamiliar present, as
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