Many Hong Kong horror films of the 1950s were pedagogical in nature, and subsequently had a great influence on the Hong Kong New Wave (1980–90). Much of the existing scholarship on Hong Kong horror focuses on New Wave films such as Ching Siu-tung's A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) and Stanley Kwan's Rouge (1988) (Zou 2008; Lim 2009). However, scholarship less often pays attention to earlier Cantonese horror films. Without examining these earlier films, we cannot fully understand the practice of adaptation and the depiction of the female ghost in New Wave horror. These films are neither widely circulated in the West nor dubbed or subtitled in English, and limited attention is given to earlier Cantonese cinema in Western academia. Even within Chinese-language scholarship, compared to studies of films in the Republican era (1911–49), Cantonese films before the New Wave are rarely studied. They are either characterized as cu zhi lan zao (roughly produced and hastily made) or yue yu can pian (dilapidated and valueless Cantonese films). Compared to the aesthetically advanced output of the more vertically integrated Mandarin studios such as the Shaw Brothers Studio and Motion Picture & General Investment Co. Ltd, Cantonese films were often criticised as inferior, backward and aesthetically underdeveloped. Because of the criticism from both intellectuals and cultural elites, Cantonese film-makers had tried to elevate Cantonese cinema since the 1930s, by the means of making films with ‘healthy’ themes of nationalism and anti-superstition. One of the means was adaptation of classic literary novels and folk tales. Interestingly, horror motifs or stories of female ghosts – forbidden themes in promoting Cantonese films – were often used and adapted so as to mount social and cultural interventions.

This chapter focuses on two Cantonese horror films, Beauty Raised from the Dead (1956) and Nightly Cry of the Ghost (1957), in order to examine the reincarnation of neoi gwei (female ghosts). I argue that the little-studied Hong Kong horror films of the 1950s can be understood as a site of political and cultural intervention. Most of these horror films are about reincarnation. The production of these films can also been understood as a process of ‘reincarnation’.