<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

A Chinese Ghost Story Sien nui yau wan
Release Date	July 18, 1987 (Hong Kong)
Genre	Horror
Director	Siu-Tung Ching
Screenwriter	Songling Pu (novel) Gai Chi Yuen
Stars	Leslie Cheung Joey Wang Ma Wu
Studio	Tai Seng Video Marketing (US DVD)

A Chinese Ghost Story is a 1987 supernatural ghost story, a remake of Li Han-shiang’s Enchanting Shadow, which originally adapted The Magic Sword, a story by Pu Song-ling. Tsui Hark, largely credited with the reinvention of Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s, produced, with Ching Siu-Tung directing. The film has two sequels, A Chinese Ghost Story II and A Chinese Ghost Story III. It holds an honored place as one of the best and best-beloved of Hong Kong supernatural fantasy action tales.

A naive young scholar named Ning Tsai-shen (Leslie Cheung), working as a tax collector, comes to town to do his job. In a world of violent and greedy men, he is a gentle soul, unwilling to eat food from a murdering swordsman even though he’s starving. In town, he fails rather miserably at collecting any taxes, then finds abandoned Lan Ro temple to spend the night in—where he blunders into the middle of a sword battle between the swordsman from earlier and Taoist monk Yen Che-hsia (Wu Ma), who warns him not to stay at Lan Ro.

The temple is haunted, of course, by restive spirit Nieh Hsiao-tsing (Joey Wong), who's enslaved to a thousand-year-old tree demon. Hsiao-tsing is supposed to seduce Ning and then consume his life essence for the tree demon, but Ning's compassion and innocence keep her from doing so. While she’s falling for him, he’s falling for her. He vows to save her from the tree demon and her impending marriage to a lord of the underworld by finding her ashes and giving them proper rites. With the help of Yen, who leaps through trees and fights evil in true drunken and aggressive, bearded monkly splendor, Ning goes about attempting to do so.

It's a task that takes him into the demon's inner sanctum and a petal-filled tub with Hsiao-tsing, the middle of an all-out battle between Yen and the tree demon's wide, endlessly long and disgustingly agile tongue, and into the underworld with Yen to battle Lord Black and legions of underworld soldiers. In the end, Hsiao-tsing’s spirit is saved so she can go on to reincarnation, but Ning is left forlorn, wishing for his beautiful love.

What makes it all such a pleasure is the stunning mix of lush visuals, over-the-top, nearly nonstop action, Chinese legend, supernatural gore, comedy, and romance. Blue filtered night woods, luminary lanterns, miles of sheer, billowing fabrics, leaping, flying battles, Joey Wong and her supernatural anklet bell signal to the tree demon, all of this is a delight. The sucked-dry corpses that reanimate and stalk Ning in the temple may be ridiculously fake and the English sub-titles rather like reading a cryptographic dream translation, but the energy and passion of the film’s hyperrealism and supernatural lore are without parallel in Western film.