• Hong Kong Home
• Whats On
• Features
• 
• 
• Bookmark this site

Hong Kong's infamous master of horror never intended his films to be all shock and gore

Read our other features:
Final cut: Who decides what you see?
Johnnie To: The Auteur
Wong Chun-chun: The accidental feminist
Wong Jing: The crowd pleaser
Pang Ho-cheung: The enfant terrible

Herman Yau never intended to become a cult director, but there’s no doubt that the long-haired guy in an Iron Maiden T-shirt sitting before me now is one of the mainstays of Hong Kong’s horror cinema. But as I still haven’t decided whether I should thank him or insult him for such nasty classics as The Untold Story (1993) and Ebola Syndrome (1996), for now I let him do the talking.

“I didn’t give it much thought,” Yau says of the notoriously stomach-churning content of those early movies. “Believe it or not, they were shot quite innocently, without too much deliberation. I just let my instincts choose the visual effects that I felt the stories needed. You say that they’re violent, but to be honest, when I was making the films, I didn’t actually know that they would turn out to be so gory…”

And gory they are. In The Untold Story, a family comes across the insane Anthony Wong, who murders and dismembers them before recycling them into meat buns. Yum. Then, in Ebola Syndrome, Wong cranks up the insanity a notch by catching the Ebola virus and then sharing it with all of those who have ever wronged him.

In an attempt to deflect the blame, I suggest the possibility that Yau was simply obeying the scripts’ gory details – but no. “In Hong Kong, most of the details about [a character’s] actions don’t get written into the script. In The Untold Story, the script simply stated that the murderer ‘kills the whole family’, with no indication as to how it should be done.” As for the gory stuff in Ebola Syndrome, Wong Jing (yes, that Wong Jing) takes the blame. “He presented me with the idea of teaming up with Anthony Wong again, before saying ‘the rest is up to you – but make sure it’s disgusting and terrifying too.’ We did our best.”

Yau went on to make many more terrifying movies after that, including the first six instalments of the horror comedy series, Troublesome Night, which now spans some 19 movies. But despite his name now invariably being linked to the local horror tradition, it’s not exactly by choice. “I do like horror movies, but I make them mainly because that’s what people want from me. For a chick flick, people go to Stanley Kwan or Peter Chan, but if it’s a disgusting movie you want, then Herman’s your man. I have been slightly typecast, I suppose. But I don’t want my film career to be just horror movies.”

In fact, Yau has a wide range of genres under his belt, from comedy to serious drama and social commentary such as From the Queen to the Chief Executive (2000), or Whispers and Moans (2007). When asked about his favourite films and influences, Yau hardly has a ghost story or horror movie to mention. Directors David Lynch, Shohei Imamura and Rainer Werner Fassbinder come up as his personal favourites. “I like the way that things develop into extremes in Fassbinder’s films,” says Yau, “especially human emotions. His films are raw in the sense that they’re often out of synch and out of focus. What touches me as a filmmaker is Fassbinder’s determination to just shoot, irrespective of the lack of wonderful lighting or locations.”

A little like Yau himself? “I do have that same mentality, but I can’t totally adopt it in practice. The market simply doesn’t allow for films to be too unrefined. Many audiences think that raw movies are a result of lazy production. They look for films that are reasonably delicate, with tidy packaging. But you don’t need to make a film slowly to make sure you are paying it your full attention. Fassbinder made one of his best films in just seven days. I work fast too.”

As a result of his speed, Yau is a prolific director. “Making garbage is better than making nothing,” he once honestly remarked. I challenge him on this point, but he just returns my question. “Why wouldn’t that be true? If you’re not making anything, you just end up sitting there looking like an idiot. I’d rather make another film than look like an idiot.”

Edmund Lee

Read our other features:
Final cut: Who decides what you see?
Johnnie To: The Auteur
Wong Chun-chun: The accidental feminist
Wong Jing: The crowd pleaser
Pang Ho-cheung: The enfant terrible