The White Snake Films: Complicating ‘Hong Kong Horror Cinema’

Considered one of the four great folktales in the Chinese oral tradition, the legend of the White Snake and its theatrical and popular cultural metamorphoses played an important role in the pre-cinematic origins of Hong Kong horror cinema. This chapter first analyses the horror elements in the White Snake tale from its earliest written versions onwards, with an emphasis on male sexual encounters with a snake woman and their horrifying aftermaths. It then surveys the changing representation of gender and horror and the transformation of the ‘demonic love’ of the snake woman to the ‘pure love’ between her and her human husband in a series of films based on the White Snake legend from the 1920s to the 1970s. The films include early Japanese and Chinese experimental films The Lust of the White Serpent (Jasei no in, directed by Kurihara Kisaburō, 1921) and Lakeshore Spring Dream (Hubian chunmeng, directed by Bu Wancang, 1926); the commercial trilogy The Righteous Snake (Yiyao Baishe zhuan, directed by Runje Shaw, 1926–7) made by the parent company of Shaw Brothers in Shanghai in the 1920s; the Japanese-language Hong Kong–Japan co-production The Legend of the White Serpent (Byaku fujin no yoren, Toyoda Shirō, 1956); the 1962 Shaw Brothers’ Huangmei diao film Madam White Snake (Baishe zhuan, directed by Yueh Feng); and the Hong Kong-Taiwan co-production Love of the White Snake (Zhen Baishe zhuan) of 1978, made by a director (Li Han-hsiang) who connects Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland Chinese film-making through his illustrative career.

Centred on a very horrific concept (a monstrous snake disguised as a beauty and married to a human male), these films nonetheless enrich or even challenge our understanding of the genre of horror cinema in their service to a wide range of other genres: operatic performance, romantic melodrama, fantasy adventure, slapstick comedy, and social and political commentary. In addition to challenging the very concept of horror, this cluster of White Snake films poses further challenges to the idea of Hong Kong cinema, as they range from a Tokyo production, a Shanghai production, a Hong Kong–Japan co-production, to a production based in Hong Kong with South Asian distributors, and a Hong Kong–Taiwan coproduction with a Shaw Brothers director, Taiwanese actors and distributors, Japanese crew members and outdoor scenes shot in South Korea and Taiwan.