A cult film regarded as one of Hong Kong’s scariest, the restored The Imp (1981), directed by Dennis Yu, was screened at Summer IFF in the section “The Taste of Cult”, bringing an unsettling chill to Hong Kong’s midsummer.

Like many fellow Hong Kong New Wave directors, Dennis Yu received part of his education overseas, studying at UCLA. Yu’s directorial career spanned only eight years, during which he directed seven films throughout the 1980s, but despite this relatively short career, his bold and distinctive style can be seen in films such as See-Bar (1980), The Beasts (1980), and Evil Cat (1987).

Hong Kong horror films of the 1970s often emphasised gore and pushed the limits of shock and sensory stimulation, while those of the 1980s frequently mixed horror with genres such as comedy, action and erotica, making them less overtly frightening while remaining entertaining to watch. The Imp remains a special case in Hong Kong horror because it does none of these things, relying neither on bloody displays and mutilation nor exaggerated soundtracks and jump scares; instead, the film makes careful use of chiaroscuro lighting, sound design, flashbacks, parallel editing and claustrophobic sets to tell a frightening and fatalistic story about a doomed man and his anxiety about becoming a father.

The film follows an unemployed man who, with a pregnant wife and an expanding family to support, takes a job as a night-shift security guard in search of some financial stability, but as his colleagues begin dying in increasingly strange circumstances, he discovers the tragic fate that may be waiting for him as well. One of Dennis Yu’s most interesting choices is the use of shots from the ghost’s perspective, placing the characters under the watch and manipulation of a supernatural presence. The film holds back the physical appearance of this presence until the very end, and until then it remains invisible but seemingly everywhere, watching and controlling events as though human lives were little more than puppets, which adds to the film’s sense of fatalism and the idea that people can be powerless against fate or a force greater than themselves.

The film is expressionist in its approach, extending the emotions of its characters into the mise-en-scène and using the surroundings to reflect their inner conflicts. The hollow, empty building, green and crimson lighting and heavy smoke that obscures the characters’ vision become expressions of the man’s own fear, pressure and growing distress, while the ending offers no easy resolution: are these tragedies really happening, or are they hallucinations experienced by an unlucky and frightened man struggling with marriage, unemployment and the financial burden of a newborn? The audience is left somewhere between his dreams, nightmares and increasingly ominous signs, never entirely certain whether what we are watching is the work of a vengeful spirit or the result of his deteriorating mental state.

The Imp takes a different approach from many traditional Hong Kong horror films, and its unconventional treatment of the genre has long been recognised by the Hong Kong film industry and audiences. In Yu’s own words: “To direct a good horror film, before you can terrify the audience, you have to scare yourself first. If you can’t feel the emotions the movie is trying to convey, how can you ever convince the audience to feel the story?” Following that belief, the story and visual choices in The Imp work together to create a frightening film that scared audiences at the time and has lost very little of its power since; forty-five years later, it still doesn’t feel dated.

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Written by Jade Wong

Featured image courtesy of Summer IFF

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