S04E03 – Jiangshi “Hopping Vampires?”

We’re joined by researcher Katarzyna “Kasia” Ancuta to learn more about the Chinese creature known as the Jiangshi – but more famous in the West as “Hopping Vampires.” It turns out that their history is being complicated by their appearances in pop-culture!

Jiangshi Movies: (affiliate links)

Encounters of the Spooky Kind

Mr. Vampire

Rigor Mortis

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires

Additional Reading:

The Hun and Po soul

Scared Stiff: Jiangshi and Chinese Vampires – from the Palgrave Handbook of Vampires

Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling (wiki)

The Shibian (The Animated Corpse) by Pu Songling (project gutenberg)

Penanggal (pen-nan-gal)

Manananggal  (Mana nan gal)

Pop (Thai Ghost) – wiki

Krasue (Thai version of Manananggal)  “pop krasue” in episode audio – sounds like “pi-krasue”

Previous Episodes Related:

Chinese Ghosts

Mr. Vampire is available on DVD and Blu-Ray now, but you might have to track down an import.  Or you can watch it streaming on The Criterion Channel.  

Transcript (AI Generated via REV.COM)

Blake Smith: Yeah, no worries. This is cool. Karen Stollznow: Thanks for joining us. It’s my pleasure. Always happy to talk monsters. Blake Smith: Me too, us too. Kasia Ancuta: I kind of do monster studies generally, so it kind of bridges a lot of other things because I mostly do cultural studies, so religious literature, film, wherever you can find monsters, I’ll go there. Karen Stollznow: Could you introduce yourself to our audience? Kasia Ancuta: So my name is Kana Anta, although most people here call me Kasha because that’s easier to pronounce. And I work on Asian gothic and Asian horror topics. So I kind of bridge literature, literary studies, cultural studies, film studies, television studies, and basically anything that has anything to do with Asian gothic and Asian fora. Blake Smith: Today we’re going to be talking about a monster that I’ve wanted to discuss for a long time, but I’ve been very hesitant because I only know it through pop culture and don’t want to lose the folkloric and historic context. And so you seem like the perfect guest to discuss this, and we’re going to be talking about the Jiangshi hopping vampires of Asia. So what is the Jiangshi, at least maybe we should start with what was it originally? Because I think your research really gets into stuff that I love talking about, which is the evolution of monsters through the filter of pop culture. Kasia Ancuta: First of all, disclaimer, I cannot actually speak Chinese, so my pronunciation of all the Chinese terms is probably going to be terrible. Blake Smith: I’ll be worse, I promise. Kasia Ancuta: So the Jiangshi is actually not a vampire, sorry to disappoint you, but it is something that I think the closest translation would be the stiff corpse. So it’s a body in the state of rigor mortis that moves. And originally I would put the Jiangshi as a type of a Chinese ghost. So basically a monster, a creature that is representing the unad, and particularly the unad tied to the body, the corpse of that person. So there are many, many different explanations as to what exactly makes someone into a Jiangshi. I mean, how do you become a stiff corpse? And two of the most common explanations have to do with the types of souls that apparently inhabit the body according to Chinese beliefs. So there are different beliefs about the souls, and you can have many souls inside you apparently, but they sort of roughly get divided into two types. So there is the hanal and the port soul. One of them is associated with a Jiangshi and the other one with a yin. So the young soul, the hanal is the one that is kind of more lofty, more intellectual, and eventually rises to heavens to become the ancestral spirit. But the al, which is associated with yin is stuck with a body and it basically gets to live next to the corpse in the graveyard and eventually disappears once the body decomposes. And both of those types of souls can produce ghosts. Only these ghosts are different. So when you find a typical Chinese ghost in ghost stories, those ancient ghost stories that have almost 2000 years of history right now, those would be usually the ghosts, the more elevated ghosts. They talk, they read poetry, they dance, they flirt, they do all kinds of very humanly things. But the ghost that is associated with a parcel is nothing of that kind. I mean, it’s basically a stupid piece of meat that keeps on moving sometimes. And so the typical explanation of the Jiangshi is that it is that the pothole is kind of lower soul that gets trapped in the corpse and cannot leave. And because of that, it’s reanimating the corpse. On the other hand, there is also a different hypothesis that says that the Jiangshi becomes this kind of spirit or becomes this kind of monster because it dies with an extra breath inside of its lungs. So this extra breath is apparently something that animates the corpse. And there is also a theory that it is basically just a body that gets inhabited or possessed by a random spirit that sort of wanders around. So there will be a random spirit, lower kind of spirit that sees an empty body and uses it as a vessel. So you have all these kind of different theories, how the body becomes reanimated. However, there is a clear distinction and the early stories are repeating that once we die, very soon after we die, the apparition can contain all kinds of souls into it, but eventually that kind of higher soul is going to leave and you are stuck with the lower soul. That is kind of just what we would be calling the hop vampire or the stiff corpse. And the difference is visible because the narratives would have the ghost speaking, making bargains, pleaing, and then suddenly they lose their speech, they start drooling and start chasing people, and it’s stuck on a tree and not much happens after that. So there’s a very clear transition in how these beliefs are connected. Blake Smith: That is fascinating. This reminds me a little bit of the sort of in neuroscience, there’s that concept of the primitive brain or the reptile brain versus the higher functions of the neocortex. I think ultimately you have to kind of synthesize that into one brain model, but that idea of there being two parts of the identity is really fascinating. And while I see parallels to Freudian concepts, so this is really interesting, Kasia Ancuta: Well, maybe the ancient Chinese were onto something. Karen Stollznow: Can you tell us a little about the origin of the term Jiangshi? We read that it was originally two words. Blake Smith: Jiang and Shi, right? Kasia Ancuta: Yeah, she is the corpse. Okay. I dunno what it looks like as a Chinese character. So the Romanized version or the pinine version can be similar, but it can actually represent totally different sounds. It’s usually spelled in opinion as SHI, and that’s when it refers to the corpse. So I don’t think that that word can actually mean something else, but I may be wrong here. You would need to ask someone who speaks Chinese. Blake Smith: Not a problem. Kasia Ancuta: However, the Jiangshi, the term actually comes from another word, which was Ian. Okay. So there was this very prolific writer literati in the long 17th century called Pu Songling. Blake Smith: Oh yeah, we’ve talked about him before. Kasia Ancuta: Yeah, he’s probably the best known author of the kind of stories of the strange of that time. And he wrote this story called Ian, which is according to the experts, is the first time when the word, this corpse is actually used to mean this kind of corpse that chases you and tries to steal your breath and all this kind of stuff that becomes Jiangshi later on. So the story itself that he narrates is it had prototypes in earlier writings, which go back to at least the 12th century, but it’s the first time that he actually alters the traditional Chinese meaning of that corpse. And it’s no longer just the body, but it becomes this kind of monster. But in the later stories, the most famous Jiangshi stories which are written in the 18th century and early 19th century, it already features as Jiangshi. I mean, so it’s not the Ian anymore, it’s Jiangshi, at least as much as I was able to figure out from trying to transcribe and transl translate stuff. Yeah, Blake Smith: Yeah, absolutely. That is fascinating. So these creatures exist in written stories, in that body of work, is there evidence that people literally believed in them as an experience that you would have in real life? Or is this always more of a mythical type framework? Kasia Ancuta: Yes, I would say there is evidence that people believe them because the story’s in question. Okay, so to understand that the tradition of writing these stories, it starts almost 2000 years ago, and we have the type of story, which in Chinese is called and basically is a record of anomalies mean. So they are very tiny, like one paragraph stories which supposedly just narrate what happened to real people. I was going to market and I met this corpse on the way, and we had a conversation. So it’s written in a very kind of matter of fact way as a record. And these stories very often feature in historical narratives when you have simply a collection of anecdotes and stories from the region. So I would believe that there is at least some understanding that people believed that these monsters, these creatures were real. Now a little bit later, these older stories get repackaged. They get repackaged in nicer words, they get changed into vernacular Chinese and they appear in more literary sources. So by the time when we get them in the 18th century, they are a bit of a mix. They’re a mix of the record, a legend and the literary fantasy. And at this point, it’s a little bit hard to tell. However, the Jiangshi itself also has folkloric roots in a number of beliefs. The most obvious of those is there is in the province of Hunan, there is basically a practice of the, so-called corpse driving. At least that’s what was recorded during the Ching Dynasty. In the province of Hunan, there is a practice known as transporting the corpses over a thousand li. So a li is a measurement of about 500 meters. So that would basically mean transporting a corpse over 500 kilometers, Blake Smith: Wow. Kasia Ancuta: Something like that. And in that province also there is a practice of Jiangshi, if I pronounce it correctly, it means driving corpses in is a part of the province, which is kind of very famous for that practice. Okay, where does it come from? So it comes from a couple of sources. First of all, in Chinese culture, the grave site is extremely important. So people want to be buried with their ancestors because the ancestors are kind of a growing group of spirits. And when you die, you’re going to join the ancestors of your family and your descendants need to take care of your grave. So if you die away from home and you get buried a lonely place, nobody’s going to take care of you. Nobody’s going to feed your ghost, and you’re going to become this unlucky, wandering hungry spirit, and nobody wants that. Now in the Ching Dynasty, we see an increased migration of people to the centers of commerce, to cities. And that very often means leaving your ancestral village and going far, far away to find a job. And of course, people die. So there is a worry that if they die away from home before they manage to get there, they’re going to become those poor ghosts. So the families hire people to bring the corpses back. But of course, in those days you don’t have ambulances, you don’t have the way of transporting that stuff. So they hire people to carry the corpses. Now, how they carry the corpses is of course a matter of interpretation. One version says that they would collect a number of corpses, they would put them on a long bamboo pole, and the two corpse drivers would be sort of carrying that pole between them, but the corpses would be bouncing up and down on that pole, and that gave an illusion of jumping. Another part was that sometimes people would be transporting corpses by simply carrying them on their back, but because it’s an unsightly kind of thing to be seen with a corpse on your back, they would normally travel by nights. They would normally ring a bell to tell people to get clear of their way, and they would very often cover themselves and this corpse with some kind of a cloak so that not to upset people with an image of death. And that would kind of make them appear a bit bigger, a bit taller, a bit monstrous, having two heads. I don’t know. So there are all these stories that, of course this is the rational explanation, but the official sort of explanation suggests that the people who are the corpse drivers were Taoist priests and Taoist priests are skilled in thunder magic. Now, thunder magic is basically all kinds of magic that are used to communicate with the dead control, weather, do a lot of other stuff. It’s a fascinating topic, and one of the thing is that you can control the corpses. So by the use of amulets and talismans, you’ve seen those in the movies, those yellow papers with cryptic red messages that they would stick to the fort of the dead person. It’s possible for them to reanimate that person and make them walk or jump by themselves so that they don’t have to carry them. So that would be the official Taoist explanation of it. Now, it’s hard to say of course, but I do have to tell you that I once met a student who claimed that her father’s friend was one of those corpse drivers and that he indeed used magic. So there are people who believe in that even today. Blake Smith: Wow, that’s really interesting. It reminds me a little bit of the goum where you use a text to animate it and then ate it. Well, so you sort of, a little spoiler, you’ve already answered this question, but I’d like to go a little deeper because I think, and I imagine this is true for a lot of people, my first exposure to these was through the film Mr. Vampire, and which in the English translation, you see the word vampire right there in the title. But what you see on screen is certainly not exactly a Western European style vampire. Karen Stollznow: What’s the relationship, if any, between a Jiangshi and what we think of as a vampire in the European monster tradition? Kasia Ancuta: Well, that connection is kind of evolving mostly around the Mr. Vampire movie that you just mentioned, which was made in the mid eighties actually. When you start researching the Hong Kong and Chinese vampire films or Jiangshi films, you find that there was a number of films made before that. There were films made in the 1930s, which featured Jiangshi in the title. However, I mean, I haven’t seen those films, I’ve only read about them, but the descriptions seemed to be much closer to what we would expect of European vampires. And a lot of notes kind of point out to the fact that around that time we had a release of Universal’s Dracula in China so that the films were probably trying to kind of copy something that they saw over there. And then there are occasional Sie movies or vampire movies appearing in the fifties, sixties and seventies. But it isn’t until the eighties that this becomes a fashion. And with the two movies, the first one being the encounters of a Spooky Kind, and then Mr. Vampire, they become such a hit that there is a new genre of Hong Kong movies that appears after that Y din, so that the Jhi movies basically. And there is a lot of imitation of those. Now, again, critics have pointed out that this also coincides with the moment when Hammer Horror is making a lot of vampire movies. And you have to remember that at this time, Hong Kong has very close ties with Britain, so they do get to have a lot of releases of those films. We even have this strange kind of collaboration between am horror and Hong Kong, the Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires. And it’s really ironic because that film actually essentially does something very similar to what Mr. Vampire did, but the world wasn’t ready. Blake Smith: I just rewatched it maybe two years ago, and I was shocked, first of all, how modern it felt. I mean, even though I am a big fan of Hammer, it felt like it could have been made much later and I had never noticed before. But I noticed in this re-watching that you do see hopping vampires along with the more classic Dracula type character. Kasia Ancuta: Yeah, they are definitely there, even though they kind of look a bit weird with all those masks and everything. Blake Smith: Yes, Kasia Ancuta: There is that kind of aesthetic element to it, but it was definitely something that was trying to merge kung fu and vampires into a part. But I think that it was ahead of its time and that it had very lukewarm reception. But when it was done from the Hong Kong side when they did exactly the same and they also emulated Hammer a lot in those movies, then it became a hit for some reason just a few years later. So what happens is you do have the image of the Jiangshi, which gets stylized for a number of local reasons. So for instance, in this very typical version, they’re dressed like imperial officials from the Ching Dynasty. I mean, they have those long blue robes and the hats with the peacock feather and all these other stuff. Well, so the early junctions never, I mean, they wore whatever they were, the everman. I mean, anybody would die, could die and become a junkie. You don’t have to be a high class person to do that. But because of that association with the Ching Dynasty stories and everything, and the fact that, well, the representatives of the government administration are usually not liked in society In described as monstrous, they very often appear in this kind of guise in the movies, plus the movies, the majority of Hong Kong, Mr. Vampire movies and all kinds of junction movies, they’re always placed in the times of the Chinese Republic. So it’s kind of early 20th century. And so they’re kind of dated. They’re going back to the historical period. They’re not modern parts. You have a lot of tensions there because the eighties and later in the nineties, of course Hong Kong is preparing for the handover, this idea of what it’s going to be like to be returned to the motherland. How is Motherland going to treat people and their culture? And of course, the Jiangshi is a creature that kind of reaches back beyond Hong Kong and China and then the Communist Party and all that because it’s much older than this. So it’s also associated with this part. But on the other hand, there is a significant change that happens to this figure in the movies. Well, they grow fangs, okay, they never had funs before, and they begin to bite people. And so there are scenes in which the vampires are biting. The early junkie, they never bit people. They were described as having really long claw like fingernails, and they would rip you to pieces and maybe E two, but there was nothing about drinking blood. There were also stories about feeding on your breath because well, you have to remember that blood is very significant in the Western context, and we have years of believing that blood is the substance of our life, but it’s never been like this. In Chinese philosophies, there was always qi, not blood. So there is no reason why a dead person would want to feed on your blood to get their energy. I mean, they want your qi, they want your energy, and they suck it out like your breath of life. Karen Stollznow: Our English words, respiration and inspiration both come from the same Latin root spire, which speaks of both spirit and breath. So that breadth of life idea is pretty widespread Kasia Ancuta: At the same time in Western medical text. I mean, the significance of blood as being essential for us has been kind of driven into us. So I think that the vampires, plus, of course, there is the Christian background to all the kind of reasons why the vampire would be sucking blood, the kind of anti-Christian protest or satanic part of something. And that is completely missing in China. So that part is definitely imported, and it’s unnecessary because I mean, the Jiangshi doesn’t need to suck blood to do that. However, this is added to the film. Another thing that is added that once you get bitten, you can potentially become a Jiangshi, which is obviously not what happens because you become a Jiangshi when you die and your soul gets trapped. Nothing to do with this kind of contagion through bites, Blake Smith: But Kasia Ancuta: That is something that was seen in Western vampire movies, and that is something that appears in Mr. Vampire and its successors, right? Blake Smith: Yes. Kasia Ancuta: The fear of garlic, the fear of religious kind of symbols Blake Smith: Yeah Kasia Ancuta: Some way. They were using, of course, Taoist alchemy to subdue it, but it wasn’t more like, oh, I show you the amulet and you’re going to run away scared. So that’s definitely something that is a trope borrowed from these Western movies. Blake Smith: Well, in folklore, I don’t know if the stories contain this, but how would one normally stop a xi? I know that the overall goal is to get it a proper burial from what I’ve read. But if you were just ran into one late at night, what’s your best bet? Okay, Kasia Ancuta: So that’s actually not very difficult because they are very stiff and they either walk kind of like they waddle around or they kind of hop a bit, right? But they move in this kind of twitchy movement with their hands outstretch. So it’s actually super easy for them to get stuck. And many of the story feature them getting stuck on trees, getting stuck on columns of the house or parts of the fence or something. They cannot get you when you climb up a tree or climb up a fence, or they cannot get you when you run very fast. So you can outrun them very quickly. And once the sun comes out in the morning, they stiffen. So at this point, what you do is you dislodge them from the tree and you carry them back to the coffin, or you dispose of them in Yuan may stories they need to get back to their coffins because they risk basically somehow dying or burning when the sun hits ’em. And there are some stories, which well, I find kind of cruel. There’s a story of a man who meets a Jiangshi and he is scared. So he decides to steal the lid of the coffin so that the Jiangshi cannot return back home. And the Jiangshi comes back and it’s pleading with him. It says that he died alone and he’s very sad and he’s just looking for some offerings because nobody’s feeding him and he just wants to go back to the coffin, but the man refuses and well, essentially, that causes the vampire to die, or sometimes they were burned by people as well. So that can be a cruel way of dealing with that. I mean, the stories are not very sympathetic towards them. Karen Stollznow: Our English words, respiration and inspiration both come from the same Latin root spire, which speaks of both spirit and breath. So that breath of life idea is pretty widespread. Kasia Ancuta: Well, you have to remember that the junction are essentially the corpses of non ancestors. So they’re corpses of unwanted poor people pretty much. So there’s a class level to it. I mean, it’s interesting because in the films, they’re represented as sort of at least middle class or Richard based on the burial gowns. But essentially the unclaimed bodies were the ones that the families didn’t care, or they didn’t have family or the families, they didn’t want to pay anybody to bring them home. So they’re kind of like the beggars of the dead world. Blake Smith: But we recently, well, not too recently, we talked to Irving Finkel, who is the ologist who works for the British Museum, and we were talking about ancient Mesopotamian grave rights and how they dealt with ghosts and demons. And even back then, 5,000 years ago or more, it was the practice to feed the ghosts. So this idea of the care and feeding of the dead is really, really old and really fascinating and not very common here. I mean, I guess the closest thing in America would be taking flowers to the grave, and that’s hardly the same thing. And I understand there’s a religious component to it, but that idea of ancestor connectivity and having an identity after you die is really ancient. And it is fascinating to see how cultures deal with violations of those norms. Kasia Ancuta: But you also have to remember that it wasn’t originally necessary to feed all the ghosts. So you had the filial piety and your kind of obligations were towards your immediate family, but only two parts of your immediate family. So in a really cruel way, if your child died very young, it wasn’t kind of considered an ancestor, right? And very often you would have a situation where a child who died of some disease very young, would not be even included in the family tomb. It would be just buried somewhere on a side without that as a kind of, oh, it’s a mistake that happened right in this way. Wow. Even worse, it was when it was a virginal daughter, right? Because she didn’t belong to anybody. She didn’t belong to her parents anymore, but she didn’t have a husband or children to take care of her. That’s why the Chinese ghost stories are so full of virgin female ghosts that they’re roaming the world and looking for some potential husband. Yeah. Blake Smith: Well, I’ll put some links in the show notes because we’ve talked about those ideas in some of our previous episodes. That is really interesting and really great for the sort of spooky season over here. One of the aspects I had not considered at all when I was prepping to talk about this topic was the impact of politics and censorship on ghost stories and their portrayal in pop culture. Can you talk a little bit about how the CCP has influenced the representation of these and media? Kasia Ancuta: Absolutely. Okay. So the heyday of the Vampire films was in the late eighties and 1990s, but then what happens is in 1997, we’ve got the Hong Kong handover, and of course that affects the Hong Kong film industry tremendously, right? Because until then they were relatively free, and suddenly now they have to comply with a lot of censorship from the communist government of China. And for a few years there existed this system. The critics would jokingly refer to it as one country, two cinemas, and they were trying to kind of censor the films to be released in the mainland, the mainland. So they had to remove a bunch of things. They had to remove anything that would be deemed political, anything that would show China in some kind of unfavorable world, anything that would be seen as a bad role model for the youth advocating some kind of risky behaviors, drugs, or, I dunno what else. But interestingly, also, the Chinese Communist Party isn’t a crusade against ghosts because very soon they figured out that ghost stories can be well revolutionary in their meaning. There can be a lot of criticism hidden in ghosts and monsters. So there is a couple of clauses, but there is one very obvious clause in the censorship law that forbids anything that would advocate superstition and supernaturalism. And that can mean either texts, which are very openly engaging with religious practices in some way, but it also means ghosts, right? It also means all those kinds of beliefs. And this is indeed quite funny because if you go to China, I mean, everybody knows all the ghost stories, everybody knows those writers like Pong Ling, but somehow you have to really jump through hoops if you’re trying to portray something like this in film. So it took a while for China to start developing any kind of type of a horror film industry that would be taken more seriously, as most of the horror films would have to tell you that everything is a dream or it’s just the ravings of a disturbed brain Blake Smith: Ah Kasia Ancuta: Some kind of hallucination or something. And that was, of course, very limiting. But what happens in the 21st century, particularly after the first decade, is that we begin to see a surge in, so-called Emo. So these are interim net movies. These are movies which are produced directly for the streaming on the internet. So because of that, they don’t have to go through censorship, at least they didn’t have to go through censorship before because now the laws have changed and they also need to comply. And that allowed for the production of kind of cheaply made horror movies that started appearing in all those platforms like Ichi, Tencent, we tv, all these kind of Chinese streaming services that are very popular in China, but also in the region. We get them in Thailand as well. And at first there was a limitation on those films. They had to be shorter, they had to be about one hour long only, and they were not allowed to be released on any other platforms. They were not allowed to be shown on TV or in cinemas or maybe event on DVDs or something. They were just meant to be streamed, and they were extremely derivative. So they would just churn out very similar stories. But in time, they gained a bit of respectability, they started attracting better actors, better special effects. And now, I mean, there is a lot of good stuff there together with a lot of not so good stuff, okay? Because generally we are still speaking incredible numbers. And around the late 2000 tens, we start seeing a cornucopia of Jiangshi movies again. And interestingly, the Jiangshi is now not Mr. Vampire, but he’s now Mr. Zombie. Okay? So people, Mr. Zombie, obviously, because Koreans have been giving us trained to push out Television zombies. And right now the world wants zombies. Zombies are ruling the universe. So we want that. So of course, this is the ambiguity of the Jiangshi figure because technically it is a reanimated corpse, right? So why not a zombie? Why does it have to be a vampire? And these movies, the early movies are almost identical to the early Mr. Vampire movies. The plot is very, very similar. So you have the same Taoist priests, you have the same kind of two bumbling apprentices, and the stories are kind of variations of the same narrative over and over again. Interestingly, the better movies, all of them feature Sue Hochin, who is the actor, the original actor who played the Taoist priest, the Unibrow Taoist priest in Mr. Vampire movie. So he had a revival as well with those movies. And so the plots are there, but the one thing that is interesting is the treatment of it, because what we find out is that half of the film is telling you the Jiangshi story only to tell you that it wasn’t a Jiangshi after all, because the Jiangshi revealed to be a bondage using springs to fool people that he’s hopping and he’s putting on a thick makeup, or the Taoist and his apprentices are implicated themselves into trying to fool people because they want to earn money out of fake exorcisms. Or it’s told that there are some evil people who are using drugs to induce mass hallucinations in people where they start seeing ghosts and spirits. And actually in some of these films, the Taoist priest is debunking all those myths, and at the end is also apologizing publicly for the fact that by spreading Taoism, he kind of prepared people to be already gullible, and that’s why they can believe some other people into even more harmful nonsense. And there’s one movie that even finishes with the Taoist priest closing the Temple and opening, changing the Temple to be a school, to educate young people again about the dangers of superstition. Karen Stollznow: So the shift towards anti supernaturalism is coming from state direction over what kinds of stories can be told rather than any kind of organic cultural shift towards rationalism. It sounds like the Jiangshiare being significantly changed by all of these influences. Blake Smith: This is really fascinating. Where do you think they’re going to go next? Kasia Ancuta: Well, it’s hard to say because right now the Hong Kong and Chinese film industry is kind of a little difficult to differentiate because obviously the money is in China, but the artists very often come from Hong Kong. They have bigger experience with making kind of movies that are more global. On the other hand, when you’re in China, do you really need global audience when you have Blake Smith: A billion or more, right? Kasia Ancuta: So it’s kind of a blend of influences. I think the one thing that we sort of forgot to mention, there was a phase in the early two thousands when Hong Kong cinema was making less desperate attempts to try to be independent from China. And it gave us what I think is the most, the coolest Jiangshi film ever, which is rigor mortis. And that is Juno Mark’s kind of Kto pop version of the film. It was produced by Takashi Mizu because obviously that is period of the, so-called Asian Horror where everybody is trying to emulate Japanese horror And create a global kind of Pan-Asian label. And Hong Kong saw it. Hong Kong filmmakers saw it as a possibility of reaching the audience without China that they can survive on their own. And rigor mortis is this amazing, amazing story of also featuring Sue Hochin, the same actor who plays a kind of an old, formerly famous actor, actor who comes to this dilapidated apartment complex to basically commit suicide. And he finds this place is teaming with all kinds of ghosts, but one of them, the most formidable one is a Jiangshi. I mean, it’s a caretaker who dies and gets reanimated, but he doesn’t look anything like the Mr. Vampire kind of hopping Jiangshis. He is terrifying. He’s much closer to these earlier depictions of creatures with bluish black skin monsters. If anything, any resemblance to the vampire, he would be the count or lock of the vampire world. So he’s very Nora ish, and he’s scary. Okay, so this is the one Jiangshi that I can think of that is scary, that is not trying to be silly and funny and cute or whatever else we have in those stories. So if you haven’t seen that film, give it a try. Blake Smith: I’ll be putting from your text, I’ve pulled a lot of movie titles. I’ll include in the show notes with links, so maybe people can go check these out. Karen Stollznow: Kasia, you mentioned that you’re presently working in Thailand. Are there any similar monsters there that have gotten vaporized by the West, like the xi? Kasia Ancuta: Well, we do not have vampires in Thailand, even though a lot of people are desperately trying to place them into this kind of cultural context. There is a lot of misunderstood Thai creatures. It’s actually really tough to talk about Thai creatures because in English, they sort of don’t fit into any specific category. So in Thailand we have this category of p and p. It’s a little bit like the Japanese yogi. It can mean a lot of things. So the P can be a ghost, like a ghost of a dead person. It can be a spirit, a spirit of nature, any kind of animistic spirit. It can be like a demon like creature, it can be a monster. But most of the time, these Streeters do all of those things together. And one of the coolest ones, and the one that very often gets accused of being a vampire is psu. So PSU is basically flying head with and trails, oh, Blake Smith: This is like the Pinal and the Manal, right? Kasia Ancuta: Yes, yes. But Penanggalan are usually portrayed as a torso with but wings, right? Blake Smith: That’s right. Kasia Ancuta: Man, the Filipino one, Manananggal is usually the one with a torso. But when you look at [Pulasic?] or Pananggalan in Malaysia and pop krasue, they look very similar. Okay. So there is a whole bunch of these ghosts that have similar creatures, similar kind of looks and habits. Risso is usually associated with central and northeastern Thailand. It’s always a woman, the reasons she’s one of the witch like piece because she’s associated with punishment for using black magic or something like that, that you do that very often it’s seen that this creature is much linear and it’s passed on to the next generation through saliva, or you just choose another woman. And when they kind of consume the saliva of the monster, they can become the monster. So generally the idea is that once you become a rasu, somehow at night, your head and the entrails, they separate from the body and your body is lying, unconscious, waiting for you to return. If something happens to your body, then you’re kind of stuck in this figure and that’s not very good for you. So the ghost, the spirit is told to be attracted to filth. So basically anything that is of unpleasant from excrement to blood to placenta to pregnant women and fetuses and all the other things. So as usual, it’s supposed to be dangerous to pregnant women or menstruating women. There’s all kinds of taboos about that in any culture. So this doesn’t surprise us. And yeah, they are considered, there’s a lot of discussion whether they glow with a blue light or the red light when they’re flying. When you go on YouTube, tie YouTube, you see a lot of videos where people claim they have seen them flying around. There are scholars, anthropologists, I know a few who study PSU beliefs in certain places where there are people who basically believe that a certain person in a village is epic pursue, and they live with them, and they’re kind of aware of that fact that they go after the chickens or cattle or they try to save pregnant women from them. So these beliefs are very, very active as well drink blood. But because of this idea of menstruating, pregnant women sometimes gets associated with blood. However, in some of the recent films, they started being portrayed in a more vampiric way. So for instance, you see shots of them like nice Woman with a face, which is completely covered in blood because she’s been eating something disgusting. And this is a very typical shot that you would see of a female vampire in other places. So these associations are being created. So PSO would be one of those spirits P pop, which is another kind of type of hungry spirit that is supposed to get into your body and eat your end trials. That’s another of the spirit that sometimes gets accused to being vampire or vampiric at least, but, but I wouldn’t put them in the same league as the vampire. Blake Smith: They do sound quite different, but that regional idea of the head separating and int intros hanging down is so spooky and creepy, and I love it. I have not seen it in film, so I’m looking forward to tracking some of those down to see if I can get a copy and see how that looks. That looks well. It sounds really interesting. Kasia Ancuta: It’s only recently that they start being seen more seriously. I do have to say that most of the Thai films about PSU are comedies and they’re very silly. But when you really think about it, there’s nothing silly about it. I mean, imagine your head trying to rip itself out with your entry. I mean, that’s no fun. Blake Smith: Exactly. No. One of my favorite movies is John Carpenter’s version of the thing, and there’s that scene where the head separates from The Torso and it’s like, yeah, that’s so close. It sprouts spider legs in that film. But if it sprouted batwings and went on a mission, it would be right there in that same horror zone. Oh my gosh. Yeah. The Kasia Ancuta: Taiwan doesn’t have Batwings. She just flies on her own. Blake Smith: Yeah, Kasia Ancuta: Propelled by her own power. Blake Smith: Neat. It’s so interesting. All these mustards fascinate me, and I am so glad that you took the time to share this with our audience. I really appreciate it. Karen Stollznow: Kasia. Thank you so much for this interesting discussion. And now, since this is your first time on the show, it’s time for our signature question for our first time guests. What’s your favorite monster? Kasia Ancuta: Well, I’m afraid I have to kind of say I jumped the gun because I think that my favorite monster is the psu. So yeah, I mean, I kind of didn’t expect the question about Thailand there. That would be the one that I definitely would’ve chosen. I feel quite a lot of affinity with her, but if it’s not her that then I would say either going for Pontiac or for a swang would be a happy second choice. Blake Smith: Yeah, the aswang we’ve talked about only lightly, but I used to be in the Navy and had a lot of Filipino coworkers, and those legends are quite interesting. And I watched a few of the Filipino Tagalog horror movies. Those were a lot of fun. But yeah. That’s great. Karen Stollznow: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. Kasia Ancuta: You’re welcome. Happy to come back.