Horror cinema tends to offer a dual address: it is consumed as a popular genre, yet also frequently analysed as a psychic window into particular cultural practices at particular moments in time. Mark Gatiss's 2010 documentary survey of a history of horror cinema in Europe and the US notes how a certain comic self-reflexivity had begun to pervade the films once the genre had reached a stage of maturity in its cycle. Drawing on his own fascination for the genre in his youth, Gatiss notes in particular how the British Hammer horror films became increasingly camp in style and narrative as they moved into the 1970s. Indeed, Hammer Studios went as far as to collaborate with Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers on The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) (Bettinson 2011). Gatiss also discusses American horror director Wes Craven's late career slasher revivals, New Nightmare (1994) and the successful Scream franchise (1996–2011), where the films employ meta-filmic strategies that both tapped into and commented on the viewer's prior knowledge of the genre's conventions (Church 2006), but to the extent that the ‘heightened degree of intertextual referencing and self-reflexivity … ceases to function at the traditional level of tonguein-cheek subtext, and emerges instead as the actual text of the films’ (Wee 2005: 44).

Hong Kong cinema has been well noted for its extensive use of parody and pastiche (Aufderheide 1998). Likewise, while the ‘horror’ or ‘ghost film’ tradition in Hong Kong cinema is acknowledged to be drawn from Chinese literary roots and folklore traditions, the genre is also celebrated for its unabashed turn to comedy as a mode of cinematic presentation. In films such as Mr. Vampire (1985), ghosts, ghouls and monsters are frequently depicted comically, as hopping vampires, wandering spirits and underworld demons, mostly rendered in thick make-up, latex masks and movie slime. Yeh and Ng identify ‘at least two narrative prototypes in Hong Kong horror’: ‘ghost erotica’ and vampire or zombie ‘jiangshi (literally, stiff corpses)’ (Yeh and Ng 2008: 2). Like the many popular genres in Hong Kong cinema, the horror or ghost film is seen to have had its best run during the industry's ‘Second Wave’ when the industry was at its most successful and creatively diverse, from around 1984 to the mid-1990s (Teo 1997: 184–203).