These past couple of days, I rewatched Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-tung’s A Chinese Ghost Story trilogy. I’ve been watching these three films since I was a kid—I must have seen them dozens of times altogether. I used to think that she and I had become an old married couple, with no passion left, like Jiong Jiong Hero and Fragrant Fragrant Hero in Mr. and Mrs. Incredible. But this time, somehow, the experience felt quite different.
All along, Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-tung’s A Chinese Ghost Story trilogy has been a model of cinematic aesthetics in my mind. My own sense of visual aesthetics was awakened by the gorgeous visual style created in A Chinese Ghost Story by master designers such as Xi Zhongwen and Zhang Shuping. In my memory, A Chinese Ghost Story has always been practically synonymous with “beauty.”
But this time, why does it look so incredibly cult? Slime, tentacles, blood, severed limbs… What does the new A Chinese Ghost Story have on offer—Nie Chixia and Nie Xiaoqian falling in love? Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-tung’s version was hardcore from the start!
Here is the visual evidence. Warning: hardcore material ahead. If you aren’t afraid of being grossed out, read on.
1. Severed Limbs
First of all, severed limbs are just everyday fare.
The very first film opens with a head hitting the ground:
Severed limbs naturally go with plenty of blood:
This is what it means to bathe the place in blood:
Human hands and heads flying everywhere:
An extra finger:
Where did the head go?
Here it is:
Still here:
A horse’s leg? That’s nothing:
Human flesh—that’s where the flavor is:
2. Slime
Now let’s look at the slime.
All the monsters belong to the slime school.
Granny is slime school:
The centipede demon is slime school too:
The corpse demon is even more slime school:
Even Ning Caichen’s dreams belong to the slime school:
3. Tentacles
Now let’s look at the tentacles.
Granny also belongs to the tentacle school:
I really like the texture of Granny’s tongue in the first film—it looks like real flesh. The other special effects improved in the third film, but the tongue, oddly enough, started to look much more plastic.
Definitely tentacle school:
The Black Mountain Demon belongs to the tentacle school too:
The Black Mountain Demon also has some pretty hardcore tastes when it comes to sexual orientation:
While we’re at it, let’s look at kissing. Kissing is hardcore too:
4. The Truth About Seduction
Finally, let me indulge my interpretation obsession. The last hardcore point I want to make is the necessary condition for Granny to suck the essence out of men.
When I watched the first A Chinese Ghost Story as a child, there was a scene in which Ning Caichen heard Xiaoqian playing the qin, a Chinese zither, and was lured to the waterside pavilion. So I always assumed that the female ghosts working for Granny basically had one job: use their beauty to lure men within Granny’s range, after which Granny could unleash her “tongue kiss.” Several descriptions of the female ghosts’ work in the film seemed to support this theory too—“lure the men here so Granny can eat them,” and so on. I imagine many of you thought the same. But watching it again this time, I realized that this was completely wrong.
Actually, apart from the scene in which Ning Caichen is drawn in by the sound of the qin, in every scene where the female ghosts successfully complete their assignment in A Chinese Ghost Story, the men drained by Granny never change position because of the female ghosts’ attraction.
For example, the first nameless scholar to serve as cannon fodder—the first victim in the whole film—is reading in Lanruo Temple. Xiaoqian seduces him, and he is killed in the very same room:
He wasn’t seduced to “somewhere else” and killed there. He died right where he was. Since he was already within Granny’s range to begin with, why would Granny need to go through the needless step of having a female ghost seduce him first?
The second man to meet his end, Xiahou, is also seduced “in place” and drained “in place”:
Now look at the cannon fodder in the third film. A group of bandits hunting the young monk gets lost in the forest, then spots a house and is drawn in by Xiaozhuo’s voice. In the end, they become Granny’s meal. They weren’t lured to this spot—they got here first, and were merely lured into the house afterward:
So the female ghosts’ job clearly isn’t to use their beauty to draw men within Granny’s range. In all three examples above, that would be redundant. So what exactly is their job?
The answer lies in two conversations with Granny. First:
In this conversation, the bandits are plainly right in front of them. Why does Xiaodie still have to help Xiaozhuo lure the men, and why does Granny have to wait until the seduction is complete before she can use her tongue?
Second:
The young monk has clearly already been captured. Why do they still have to wait for Xiaodie to “lure” him before they can do anything?
The answer is practically shouting at us: the female ghosts luring men “somewhere” is not a necessary condition for Granny to suck out their essence. The seduction itself is.
After being “seduced”—to put it plainly, the men must be in a sufficiently aroused state—Granny can suck out their essence. The man’s level of sexual arousal is the necessary condition for Granny to extract the essence.
That is the truth about Xiaoqian’s job. Seduction isn’t for anything else; seduction really is just seduction.
I was so pure as a child. How could I possibly have noticed any of this?
Sigh. I can’t bring myself to paste any more of these images.
I dedicate this piece to the most “beautiful” (^_^) film series in my heart.
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I later followed the line of thought in this article and went further down the rabbit hole, working out what chemical substance Granny's beloved “essence” actually is. That analysis is included in my book The 24-Frame Psychology Code:
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