In this chapter I would like to focus especially on Out of the Dark, with Chow’s attempt to change his comic style. The defamiliarisation of Chow allows Chow and the director Jeffrey Lau (劉鎮偉) to develop Chow’s new device. Furthermore, by creating Chow as the uncanny dread figure with the horror sub-genre, the style distinguishes this film from Chow’s other works, for instance, Tricky Brains, The Magnificent Scoundrel , and Love on
Delivery which I have mentioned in the previous chapter. This film not only presents Chow’s
performance and image as rather unfamiliar to the spectators who might be expecting to see his comic style and the usual interpretation of wulitou, but also subverts the central idea that a horror usually focuses on. It is the time that Chow begins to add delicate feelings and more seriousness to his style. According to Taiwanese film critic Wen Tien-Hsiang (聞天祥) inStephen Chow (《
我愛周星馳》): It is the belief that gives the film its meaning, just like the latter Chow films. He also notes that this film is a fusion of horror and comedy, the contradictory genres; belief and craziness are two major topics (qtd. in Wen 254, my translation).18This film will render the spectators ask the question again about: “is that really Stephen Chow?” It is the only Chow film so far that deals directly with the two genres: horror and comedy. Of course Chow has been in the similar genre before, dealing with the existence of the spirits. Look Out, Officer! (師兄撞鬼，1990), for example, also deals with the topic of the spirits. But it does not question the real existence of the ghosts or spirits. Rather, it assumes that the idea of the spirits is already accepted. Yet Out of the Dark does not focus on the ghost itself. Rather, it deals with the idea between sanity and insanity, along with the central idea of belief, and the discussion of the true existence of ghosts or even, Chow’s image and the character are what really scare people in the end. It is surprising that Chow’s personal
18 The Chinese original text is: 如果說，恐怖片和喜劇片是本片類型上的衝突與融合；信任 (Belief) 和瘋 狂 (Craziness) ，則是主題上的兩大元素。
style appears to be a bit different from what he used to be. Perhaps it is just because of the imitation of Leon: The Professional (終極追殺令，1994).19 The appearance of Chow and the lonely figure are the same as the protagonist Leon in Leon. Also, Leon (played by Chow) has only one friend Kwan just as Leon in Leon only has Mathilda as the only friend. Both of Leons have plants to take care of, and both films have the idea of revenge. The real motivation of imitating Leon is not clear.20 Yet, it is the first time that Chow parodies a role so obviously. It is said that Out of the Dark is not so popular or highly-accepted among filmgoers. After all, trying to make a breakthrough and at the same time catching the spectators’ attention is not an easy job. From the perspective of the filmgoers, they want to see funny, bright, relaxing comic events and Chow’s performance. Yet, this film presents a rather opposite way to Chow’s previous films. Furthermore, the way Chow adds more emotional events into this film is also another issue. I propose that it is the director Jeffrey Lau that makes this film similar to The Chinese Odyssey Part One (西遊記第壹百零壹回之 月光寶盒，1995) and The Chinese Odyssey Part Two (西遊記大結局之仙履奇緣，1995).21 These three films’ themes are about love and in the end we see that the results are sad.
However, how Chow tries to express the emotion and at the same time to perform the comic events is the topic that I am most concerned about. This film gives us the familiar and also unfamiliar feelings about Chow all at once. I would like to argue that by making himself as the uncanny dread in this film, and using black humour as the technique to dissolve the horror aura, Chow reaches his attempt at ameliorating his performing style, and thus brings up the idea of the anxiety of Hong Kong before 1997.
Out of the Dark is directed by Jeffery Lau. By the time he had also directed The Chinese Odyssey Part One and Part Two (1995) with Chow. In Out of the Dark, due to an accident,
19 This film is directed by Luc Besson. Jean Reno plays the role of Leon, who is a lonely hitman. Mathilda (played by Natalie Portman) begs Leon to help her take revenge for her brother. Interestingly, Mathilda’s family is killed by the DEA agent Stansfield (played by Gary Oldman) who happens to be hunting Leon as well. In the end Leon sacrifices himself and dies with Stansfield to save Mathilda’s life.
20 It can be understood that this is a device Chow makes an attempt to internationalise his films.
21 Also directed by Jeffery Lau and starred Stephen Chow.
the public housing is said to be haunted by old Mrs. Lee’s ghost. Rumour has it that her son and daughter-in-law killed her; therefore, on the seventh day after her death, her ghost will be back for revenge. Leon (played by Chow) happens to be at the place and successfully scares the ghost away by shouting at it but unfortunately when Leon tries to negotiate with the ghost to let go, they are interrupted and the ghost runs away. Resident Kwan (played by Karen Mok) then falls for Leon because of his talent and bravery. But unfortunately Leon is considered insane and is sent back to the asylum. Kwan insists on visiting him and they both go back to the public housing because Leon claims that it is still haunted. Meanwhile, the captain of security Mr. Lo (played by Paul Lo) hears from old Mrs. Lee’s ghost that her son and daughter-in-law killed her. However, this conversation gets overheard by Mr. Lee. The Lees then decide to kill all those who know the secret. Just when they are forcing Mr. Lo and Ming (a doper who fools around the public housing and inexplicably gets involved) to jump from the rooftop, Leon and Kwan arrive on time. After Leon accidentally kills Mr. Lee, Mrs.
Lee threatens to commit suicide to take revenge on the seventh day following her and her husband’s death and finally she dies. Then the security team and Kwan follow Leon to learn how to fight with spirits. On the seventh day after the Lees’ death, the ghosts return and the crew try to defeat them by all means. In the end Leon sacrifices himself to save the rests.
Before I probe into Chow’s style in the film, I would like to start with examining the pre-title sequence. It starts with the traditional Chinese funeral custom with two papier-maché dolls/servants, the altar of the dead in the middle and lighted candles. The blue-toned picture indicates a gloomy atmosphere as the first impression of the film. It also triggers the Chinese spectators the unwanted confrontation with the topic of death and funeral, and fear. Next, the name of the film shown in black and white appears on the screen.
The music sounds uncomfortably weird as well. The camera switches back to the first scene of the altar, with a brighter background. The actors’ names are shown on the screen. Stephen Chow’s name appears vertically in white with a close-up of the papier-maché doll, making
the spooky mood even stronger. The following shots consist of close-ups of the altar including the candles, the food served to the dead and the tablet which supposedly has the name of the dead inscribed but turns out to be the name of the film. The location of the film then is shown on the screen: a tall big public housing at night time with many windows which cannot even fit in the low-angle frame gives the spectators a bizarre feeling of the opening sequence. This sequence uses the taboo of touching the inauspicious topic of death to generate the uncanny feeling in the audience, especially Chinese spectators. The viewers would sense that it attempts to build the dreaded aura to indicate that this is a horror film.
Moreover, the film borrows many elements from the old Hong Kong horror films. Many funny gags in this film are similar to the director Jeffrey Lau’s old work Operation Pink
Squad 2 (《
猛鬼大廈》，1989), which is also a combination of horror and comedy genres.What is different is that in Operation Pink Squad 2, the crew performs a serious though funny folk exorcism. However, as the leading ghost buster in the crew, though his methods and mental status are questioned, Chow performs a rather different, or wulitou way of catching the ghosts. Unlike the folk style, using bells, spells, or amulets, Leon (played by Chow) simply asks his comrades to look “shiny and energetic” and provides a theory of what ghosts really are and how they affect the brain and nerves. Also, when the guards ask him how to actually catch the ghosts, he says they should “use the clear fling film paper and use chocolate to hit the ghost” and gives the reasons on both scientific and folk aspects. He explains that the fling paper can catch the ghosts and make them disappear, whilst there is milk added in chocolate, and ghosts are afraid of cows because in Chinese folklores oxen are Yama’s guards. We learn that Leon is not a traditional ghost buster and this brings the idea that we should not be superstitious and thus the idea seeks to challenge the folk conventions.
Nevertheless, even though the film comprises sequences to make it scary, the funny comic events deconstruct the uncanny aura and retain the Chow style as a comedy. Paul Wells points out in his research on horror genre that:
Stress was placed on the importance of humour in relation to scare effects, and was clearly a strong determining factor in the perception of the genre as
“entertaining”…Comedy was also perceived as a clear mitigating factor in the acceptance of extreme scare effects and the potential levels of brutality. Horror texts were more often seen in the light of black humour or the “grotesque.” (28) Using comic devices to deconstruct the scare effects is one strategy in this film. Being the combination of horror and comedy genre, it is obvious to detect some elements of black comedy. Whilst exploring further on the structure of this film, we can employ Voytilla and Petri’s theory of black comedy. Voytilla and Petri’s point out that “[b]lack comedy uses humour as propaganda. It channels anger into a drive for social change… Humour points out the unfairness or stupidity inherent in the original, unacceptable situation” (164). This responds to Chow’s being a novel ghost buster. His methods of catching ghosts not only present his wulitou style but also indicate that he wants to subvert the cliché with people being chased and haunted by the ghost and thus being afraid of it. Within the sequence that Leon (played by Chow) is chasing Wing, who is posessed by his grandmother old Mrs. Lee’s ghost. The ghost is scared of Leon and gets trapped in a corner. The ghost tries to look out from a hole on the door carefully, and sees Leon’s eye peeking back. Next, Leon catches Wing and forces old Mrs. Lee’s ghost to call back home and apologise for being scary. After scaring away again her daughter-in-law, Leon then scolds her for speaking in a disgusting way only because she is a ghost. Old Mrs. Lee complains that after all she is a ghost and Leon has gone too far. Leon replies, “so what? Who do you think you are?” In this sequence, the original idea of being afraid of ghosts is totally subverted. The ghost is the one that does not have any privilege and is threatened and scolded by a human. Furthermore, in this phase Leon cannot solve the problem that old Mrs. Lee’s ghost is still haunting the public housing.
The ideas of the dead taking revenge and death keep returning to the viewers’ minds. As Voytilla and Petri put it:
In black comedy, the central conflict strives for institutional change.
Something is wrong with the system and a Herculean effort is required to fix it. The situation may be unfixable and the hero will most likely fail, but that failure will bring enlightenment, either to those who have been left behind or to the viewer. The hero may not be aware that he is fighting or what he is fighting for…By exaggerating a story to its most ridiculous possible conclusion, black comedy reveals the targeted system absurd. (164-65)
Using horror as a sub-genre to construct the uncanny feeling is the device to challenge the existing superstition of the dead returning for revenge. Moreover, we are not sure if Leon, as the hero, is really crazy. Thus what Leon wants to fight for and how he stands on his ground are two intriguing points. If the film attempts to change the ideas of the return of the dead, what do the ghosts mean in the end?
To deal with Leon/Chow being insane in the film, I would refer to the elements of black comedy. Voytilla and Petri again indicate that “[s]ince the hero will be charismatic and passionate in crossing threshold and justifying his or her motivation, the audience will accept their logic. No matter how many people around them tell them they are crazy, the hero will stick to their convictions until the bitter end” (166). It exemplifies the main idea of the film.
To get to the bottom of this, the fact that matters is that Leon believes everything about to happen be real. He asks the crew to believe what he believes is real, yet he never asks people to believe that he is not crazy. In this case the audience may not know why Leon comes to this public housing, and why he gets himself and his crew involved.
Here I would like to stress the issue of getting every irrelevant person involved. The public housing as the setting is one interesting point. First of all, this place is haunted, or more specifically, it was not haunted for a long time because according to the narrative it becomes haunted after the Lees’ deaths. It is just the “destination” and also homes for the ghosts to come back and take revenge. Second, as mentioned before, Leon the ghost buster
does not live here himself and the spectators may not know why he shows up here and tries to take care of old Mrs. Lee’s ghost. Third, it seems that the public housing is as well not any of the security guards’ homes. The only character who has the most connection with the public housing is Kwan. But the viewers can indicate in the opening sequence that she does not feel at home, either. Therefore, the place turns out to be an uncanny locale because no one is actually responsible for this yet the crew suffers from failure, complete shock, and even death. The idea of home leads us to Freud’s concept of uncanny: “[t]he German word
unheimlich is obviously the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, meaning ‘familiar,’ ‘native,’
‘belonging to the home’; [w]e are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar” (2). Though Freud suggests that the uncanny is related to the castration anxiety, giving the example of “The Sand-Man,”22 the meanings of unhomely and unfamiliar tend to match the public housing. The public housing is too big as we know from many scenes to fit in the camera frame which implies there are many residents. Yet, despite the time that the Lees die that the residents come outside of their doors to gossip, in the film we do not see any occasion that the resident care about anything happens after. This weird situation gives bitterer sense to the lonely ghost-fighting crew.
Besides, the three phases of the return of the dead as the repressed make people scared. The first phase is the return of old Mrs. Lee’s ghost, and her son and daughter-in-law try to hide the secret why she dies. The second phase is the return of the dead Mr. Lee and his wife. The final phase is the return of Leon, which mixes and subverts the idea of the fear of revenge and actually makes Leon, and thus Chow, his image and style the uncanny dread.
Since From Beijing with Love, which he participated in directing and writing the
22 One story from E.T.W. Hoffman’s "The Night-pieces," published in 1817. In this story, young Nathanael is afraid of the image of the sand-man, which has been haunting him from his childhood. The sand-man (in fact is his father’s friend Coppelius) threatens to dig his eyes out after one accident one night. After he goes to college, he buys a telescope from the dealer Coppola and he falls for an automaton Olimpia made by his professor Spalanzani. In a fight which the professor and his friend (Coppola, who Nathanael claims to be like Coppelius) tear the automaton doll apart. Coppola reveals his true identity as Coppelius. Nathanael goes mad after this scene. After recovering from his illness, Nathanael gets engaged with his girlfriend Clara. On the way to the tower to see their house, Nathanael uses the telescope and goes mad again. After trying to hurl Clara from the tower, Nathanael leaps down from it.
screenplay, Chow distinctly has tried to focus more on the mental and emotional narratives and hence has moderated his physical performance and acting. We see many exaggerating physical gags and facial expressions. Instead, the comic events and structures tend to be more compact and developed. In Out of the Dark, we can notice first that Chow’s appearance somehow changes. I propose that the imitation of the protagonist Leon from Léon: already makes the audience feel absurd because the viewers are confused by the familiar figure of Leon from Léon, yet they might be expecting the familiar funny figure of Chow. This style is the first time that Chow copies a film character. In addition, most of the time in the film Chow is wearing his sun-glasses which hide his eyes from us. There are two specific times that he takes off the sun-glasses. One is when he is accidently injured during the ghost-hunting lecture and is sent to the hospital, the other is when the Lees’ ghosts return for revenge, and in a scene that he finds out that Mr. Lee’s ghost is still around, he then takes the
screenplay, Chow distinctly has tried to focus more on the mental and emotional narratives and hence has moderated his physical performance and acting. We see many exaggerating physical gags and facial expressions. Instead, the comic events and structures tend to be more compact and developed. In Out of the Dark, we can notice first that Chow’s appearance somehow changes. I propose that the imitation of the protagonist Leon from Léon: already makes the audience feel absurd because the viewers are confused by the familiar figure of Leon from Léon, yet they might be expecting the familiar funny figure of Chow. This style is the first time that Chow copies a film character. In addition, most of the time in the film Chow is wearing his sun-glasses which hide his eyes from us. There are two specific times that he takes off the sun-glasses. One is when he is accidently injured during the ghost-hunting lecture and is sent to the hospital, the other is when the Lees’ ghosts return for revenge, and in a scene that he finds out that Mr. Lee’s ghost is still around, he then takes the