The City that Haunts: The Uncanny in Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong

In Hong Kong film history, the emergence of a corpus of film productions loosely called “horror films” in the 1980s has invited film critic to adopt an allegorical approach to the reading of Hong Kong films. What figures centrally in this film discourse is the trope of Hong Kong as a haunted house. In the introduction to the programme notes of the film festival titles Phantoms of the Hong Kong Cinema in 1989, Li-Cheuk-to suggests what I would call a “socio-psychoanalysis” of the Hong Kong cinema. […]

Written by Esther M.K. Cheung
Published in Between Home and World: A Hong Kong Cinema Reader, eds. Esther M.K. Cheung and Chu Yiu-Wai, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp.352-368.