Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind

Probably the most important movie Sammo Hung directed. It may not be his best (though it is very good), but its impact is undeniable.

I don’t think this is a particularly original or hot take. There’s a whole book named after Sammo’s movie that says the same thing.

But Spooky Encounters doesn’t come from nothing. Parts of it had been floating around HK Films for years. In 1960 Shaw Brothers had adapted a classic story to make the ghost romance The Enchanting Shadow. Though this 20-year-old film probably wasn’t at the front of people’s minds in 1980, the story, and its many film versions, remained well known.

In the mid-70s, Shaw made spookier movies geared more towards the international and exploitation markets. Movies like Black Magic and its sequel weren’t funny, or particularly focused on Chinese tradition, but they created space for effect-heavy scares which had not been a big part of HK movies up until that point.

In 1978, Hung’s close collaborator Jackie Chan starred Spiritual Kung Fu. Though not a good film it did feature weird ghost/imps and a bunch of goofy special effects.

And in 1979, just a year before Spooky Encounters, King Hu (one of Sammo Hung’s early mentors), made Legend of the Mountain, a very King Hu-ish movie about ghosts, reality and frogs.

All of those feed in to Spooky Encounters, as does Sammo’s own earlier work. The monkey kung fu of Knockabout reappears here, as do parts of that film’s ‘restaurant fight’. Goofy horror jokes from The Victim are deployed here to much greater effect.

But if Spooky Encounters were just a thoughtless rehash of its progenitors it wouldn’t be a big deal. That’s not what Sammo did, though. He took all these things and created something entirely new – Chinese vampire horror comedy. Throughout the 1980s and early 90s this brand new genre that Sammo invented was huge with roughly 100 movies that tried to replicate it. And while many of them are terrible, some are amazing and none of them exist without Spooky Encounters.

If we lived in a world without Spooky Enconuters then we wouldn’t have Lam Ching-Ying riding an ostrich. Or Lam Ching-Ying stabbing a vampire in the dick. And who wants to live in that world? Not me!

Ian Whitney @ian_whitney