Introduction: Transfiguring Genre

In this chapter's examination of the Chinese supernatural-martial arts film (wuxia shenguai pian) and its contemporary iterations, I approach Hong Kong horror at a tangent, specifically as a border-crossing cinematic modality that haunts other popular genre forms. What I have in mind as a case study are Hong Kong director Tsui Hark's most recent reinventions of the wuxia shenguai genre: Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010) and Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon (2013). As Christine Gledhill rather artfully argues, ‘The life of a genre is cyclical, coming round again in corkscrew fashion, never quite in the same place’ (Gledhill 2000: 227). This visual metaphor of the recycling patterns in genre history which Gledhill conjures is a critically productive one, in that it forestalls the reductive assumption of genre repetition as a mark of popular cinema's predictability and creative ennui. The helical motion of genre reinvention mobilises a temporal schematic of cinema's historicity – an acknowledgement of a genre's cultural and historical precedence – while materially shifting its form to meet the exigencies of contemporary politics and cultural concerns. Or, as Gledhill puts it, ‘Revealing patterns or usages lost to view … enables us to trace the movements of cultural history, carried forward or intruding into the present, revealing hidden continuities and transformations working under new or disguising names’ (Ibid.). These continuities and transformations of the wuxia shenguai pian, as evident in early Shanghai film and in Hong Kong cinema, I address briefly in the next section as a way of contextualising the Detective Dee films as hybrid fusions of martial arts cinema, Chinese supernatural horror, and, even, the recent American fascination with detective dramas and police procedurals, all in an era of Chinese transnational co-productions.

In updating the wuxia shenguai pian for twenty-first-century audiences through creative genre transfigurations, Tsui Hark is doing what he has always done best in Hong Kong cinema since the 1980s: maintaining the cultural currency of the martial arts film for mainstream Chinese (and now global) audiences and, hence, retaining the box office viability of the genre.