The Hong Kong horror film is replete with a variety of monstrous murderers, from ghosts and ghouls, demons and snakes, hopping corpses and vacuous vampires, to psychotic assassins and vengeful killers. None, however, are quite like the eponymous woman warrior of The Bride with White Hair (1993), a character full of contradiction: sympathetic and terrifying, brutal and tender, merciless and righteous; a fascinating anomaly in the canon of Hong Kong horror's wronged women and vindictive spirits.

The Bride with White Hair, based on a popular novel serialised in Hong Kong in the 1950s, tells the tale of a heroic swordsman's ill-fated love affair with his ferocious enemy, a woman raised by wolves and transformed by hatred into a white-haired killer. Ronny Yu's influential 1993 film, alongside its sequel (released the same year), has elevated the figure of the frosty-follicled executioner into one of the most enduring icons of the Hong Kong horror film. The timelessness and mysticism of the story lends itself to a highly hybridised type of horror, offering wuxia (swordplay), magical fantasy, romance and erotic scintillation alongside bloody fights and savage violence in a deeply ambiguous moral landscape.

The generic fusion evident in the film results in a profound challenge to traditional notions of chivalry, especially for its honourable swordsman protagonist, who finds his loyalty divided and is often aghast at the cruelty of both his enemies and allies. The magical elements present are, too, a source of horror, in the form of the film's ultimate malevolent antagonist, a pair of conjoined twins who use sorcery as a weapon of domination and manipulation. The monstrous depiction of the twins as a horrifying genetic ‘other’ is problematic, particularly in the context of wider debates on disability in the horror genre.

The Bride with White Hair reflects and repackages traditional genre patterns for audiences in Hong Kong and around the world. Indeed, The Bride with White Hair was one of the first Hong Kong cult/horror films to find an international niche audience, appealing to fans for its supposedly transgressive and erotic content in a way that anticipated Tartan Films’ influential ‘Asia Extreme’ brand.