Their portrayal as vampires had everything to do with marketing to the West.
In the 1980s and '90s, a series of Chinese horror films became a cult sensation.
Like other monster flicks, so-called jiangshi 僵尸 movies focused exclusively on one creature: reanimated corpses dressed in Chinese court attire.
They usually came in groups, were controlled by Taoist priests, and their most distinctive feature was that they hopped. The explanation was that their legs were stiff from rigor mortis.
If the West needed any comparison, the jiangshi were kind of like zombies, in the way they moved, the way they looked, and the menacing way in which they survived"by absorbing the life force of others.
But instead, producers marketed them as vampires, the most notable example being the 1985 film Mr. Vampire.
A brief history of the jiangshi genre
Unlike many movie monsters, the jiangshi are actually benign creatures. In some films, they're even depicted as friendly, such as in Mr. Vampire 3, where the jiangshi are a pair of bumbling affable brothers.
The jiangshi's appearance in Chinese folklore is based on the real-life tradition of transporting corpses back to their homelands for burial. Their distinct hopping motion is said to be derived from the way corpses appeared to bounce when they were transported by sedan chairs.
Thus in most film depictions, the jiangshi are corpses under the care of Taoist priests, who are responsible for delivering them back to their homes. A common trope involves an inept priest who has to round up his jiangshi after they run amok and start wreaking havoc on the public.
Then why were they called vampires?
Early portrayals of jiangshi mimicked the look of Dracula. They often had pale skin, long nails, and fangs. They wore robes that invoked a vampire's cloak.
There was little reason for this portrayal other than to attract the Western market, where vampires have long been a cinematic staple. Dracula is said to be one of the most portrayed characters in film, second only to Sherlock Holmes.
So when the breakthrough jiangshi film Mr. Vampire was released in 1985, it was the obvious cultural reference for people who were unfamiliar with Chinese folklore.
The vampire comparison persisted. Mr. Vampire spawned four more sequels with the same title, and later jiangshi films even depicted them together with vampires from the West.
But with the exploding popularity of zombie films today"from Shaun of the Dead to Walking Dead"one wonders whether jiangshi might have been marketed differently if they came out today.
There are signs that the cultural reference point is changing. Online memes showing jiangshi often refer to them as "Chinese zombies." One of the most recent portrayals of jiangshi, in the 2013 film Rigor Mortis, has no reference to vampires and runs closer to the visual conception of zombies.
It just goes to show that even stories considered ingrained in a culture can shift and change when it hops over borders.
Copyright (c) 2019. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.