“Mr. Vampire” (1985). Sammo Hung’s best movie, a comedy/horror/kung fu hybrid - though he’s known for martial arts as an actor, most of his directorial/producing efforts show his fascination for ghost stories, monsters, and the supernatural. This one started a craze in Hong Kong for movies featuring Chinese “hopping vampires.” In Hong Kong, there were hopping vampire movies going back to the 1930s, but this one revived that “tired” genre.
Lam Ching-yang played a Chinese Abraham van Helsing, a Taoist who knows what’s what when it comes to the ways of Chinese vampires. He basically spent a lot of time being these movie’s van Helsing in Hong Kong: he was also the titular Magic Cop.
Jiangshi, Chinese vampires, are really not all that vampiric; they’re essentially corpses reanimated by magic and they don’t drink blood. In Mr. Vampire II, we see the ultra-creepy vampire children and even a female vampire:
But I never intended all this madness, never! And nobody really understood, how could they? That all I ever wanted was to bring them something great. Why does nothing ever turn out like it should? Well, what the heck, I went and did my best, and, by God, I really tasted something swell. And for a moment, why, I even touched the sky, and at least I left some stories they can tell, I did. And for the first time since I don’t remember when I felt just like my old bony self again, and I, Jack, the Pumpkin King..That’s right, I am the Pumpkin King!
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) dir. Henry Selick
From our stacks: Illustrations and excerpt from The Myers Houses with a Description of Beautiful and Economical Residence Buildings Showing Exterior Views and Floor Plans, and Giving Sizes and Arrangement of Rooms, with Reliable Estimates of Cost Accompanying Each Design. Designed by George W. Myers, Architect and Builder, Nos. 3 and 4 Moffat Building, Detroit, Michigan. 1893.
“I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area. I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively. I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from skim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you don’t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and no matter how I am discovered after what happens to me happens to me as I am discovering this. I will love you if you don’t marry me. I will love you if you marry someone else – your co-star, perhaps, or Y., or even O., or anyone Z. through A., even R. although sadly I believe it will be quite some time before two women can be allowed to marry – and I will love you if you have a child, and I will love you if you have two children, or three children, or even more, although I personally think three is plenty, and I will love you if you never marry at all, and never have children, and spend your years wishing you had married me after all, and I must say that on late, cold nights I prefer this scenario out of all the scenarios I have mentioned. That… is how I will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way.”
