Hopping vampires, seductive spirits and giant predatory tongues! Tsui Hark's A Chinese Ghost Story in 1987 gave many Western viewers their first taste of supernatural thrills, Oriental style. Yet the film was a comparatively late entry in a well-established genre. From Sammo Hung's Spooky Encounters to King Hu's valedictory Painted Skin , the 1980s Hong Kong ghost film cycle produced a stylish and distinctive body of work that compares with the best of Universal and Hammer.
When I was going through a phase in discovering films like A Chinese Ghost Story 1-3, Spooky Encounters 1-2, Zu Warriors From The Magic Mountain, Buddha's Palm and Boxer's Omen, this book gave me wider view of similar martial arts films, straight horror and Hong Kong cinema in general. To be honest, it doesn't seem as if further research is going to turn up many films as good as my initial discoveries and that makes me a little sad but if you really want to know these genres, this book will help.