A young tax collector walks a great distance through the elements to a town only to find that his records have been washed out by the rain. The townsfolk refuse to pay up or to house him. He ends up finding a place a place to stay in a haunted house out of town, where he runs into two swordsmen, an old master of the martial arts and a young impetuous challenger, who have been feuding for seven years. That night the younger warrior is seduced by a beautiful girl only to be attacked and desiccated by a strange supernatural creature. The old warrior finds the body and chases off some hostile spirits, cursing “Damn those Taoists!” at one point. Meanwhile our innocent tax collector hears creepy sounds as all manner of stop-motion skeletal, half-decomposed zombie types start crawling around the house. Later he meets the beautiful girl. She tries to keep him hidden from her family, especially from her father who counts on his daughters to lure healthy young men to be sacrificed for his immortality. Needless to say the tax collector falls in love with the maiden to the accompaniment of female vocalist singing a romantic ballad with western influenced musical arrangements. The plot continues to get more convoluted with more spirits and demons awakening on the one hand, and as the innocent tax collector gets caught up in the middle of rival families.
This film was made in Hong Kong in 1987, the language presumably in the Cantonese dialect. The plot is based on a folk-tale from the Qing Dynasty (Wikipedia). It combines romance with comedy and cheap horror scenes, which contain a variety of gaudy special effects for the spiritual manifestations, slimy monsters, and martial arts acrobatics. The style is reminiscent of a Middle Earth style fantasy quest with colorful, period decorations, costumes and artifacts. The characters reflect an assortment of the usual archetypes you might expect to encounter in a Chinese fairy-tale. Like many of our own horror fantasy genre movies from the same decade, the narrative of the film is too busy with discombobulated action sequences and a sappy dialogue, reasonably entertaining visually but shallow for character development. The film was very popular in Hong Kong (under British control at that time), South Korea and Japan. The lead protagonist was played by Leslie Cheung (d. 2003), a hugely famous male singer who helped to popularize “Cantopop”, a commercially successful yet vapid genre of pop music. China Central Television has rated him as one of the most popular actors and singers of the last century. The film spawned two sequels, in 1990 and 1991. A remake of “A Chinese Ghost Story” was made in Shanghai in 2011, this time with a substantial mainland China audience in mind.