The cloak, a motif from Hollywood's adaptations of Dracula, appears in the jiangshi films Vampire vs Vampire and A Bite of Love. The tropes expropriated from Western horror were fewer, but still visibly present. Cinematic portrayals of jiangshi show the corpses wearing traditional changshan garments with a talisman placed on its head that allows the Taoist priest to control the cadaver. The jiangshi films of the 1980s were a departure from the Dracula-like vampires of its predecessors.
Vampire films were also made in the 1970s, which merged the vampires of Western horror with the martial arts of Hong Kong kung fu films. The earliest concerning vampires is Midnight Vampire (午夜殭屍) directed in 1936 by Yeung Kung-Leung. Vampire.Ī number of monster films were produced before the jiangshi boom of the 1980s and the 1990s. Sammo Hung directed Encounters of the Spooky Kind and produced Mr. Qing writer Ji Xiaolan provides a detailed description of jiangshi folklore in his book Yuewei Caotang Biji ( The Shadow Book of Ji Yun, Empress Wu Books, 2021). There are thirty stories of jiangshi in Zi Bu Yu, written by Yuan Mei. A traveler is chased by a jiangshi in A Corpse's Transmutation, which killed three of his companions. In Spraying Water, the animated corpse spews a liquid that kills the wife of a government official and her two servants. They are featured in the story A Corpse's Transmutation ( Shibian) in the Shuyiji collection, A Vampiric Demon ( Jiangshi gui) and Spraying Water ( Penshui) in Pu Songling's Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, and The Demonic Corpse ( Jiangshi gui) in Dongxuan Zhuren's Shiyiji. įictional accounts of jiangshi were included in Qing collections of ghost stories and other supernatural tales. Unlike vampires, jiangshi do not drink blood or desire immortality. The ties between jiangshi and vampires, and the English translation of jiangshi as "hopping vampire", may have been a marketing ploy manufactured by Hong Kong studios eager to enter Western markets. Jiangshi hop as they move and are able to absorb qi, the essence of the living. The priest commands the jiangshi and directs it to a location for a proper burial.
The jiangshi is a corpse reanimated by a Taoist priest. Derived from Chinese folklore, jiangshi fiction first appeared in the literature of the Qing Dynasty.