Australians love a vampire. Movies and television series about them are consistently high raters, so it was no surprise that this year's Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) looked to the netherworld of bloodsuckers and ghosts for a programme strand.
And where better to seek inspiration than Hong Kong, home of geung si - the hopping vampire?
When programmer Al Cossar saw Juno Mak Chun-lung 's Rigor Mortis - one of the first geung si films in more than 20 years - at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, his curiosity was piqued. "That sparked something with us because we do a lot of retrospective programming," he said. "We want to broaden the festival."
The result was "A Perfect Midnight: Haunted Hong Kong", a supernatural sampling of six films that also included Ricky Lau Koon-wai's 1985 classic Mr Vampire, Stanley Kwan Kam-pang's Rouge (1988), and both parts of Mid-Nightmare (1962 and 1963), written by horror film master Ma Xu Weibang, who died in a car accident after finishing the script.
Co-presented by the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, it worked to some extent as a self-contained event, with the offerings in this programme shown in the second half of the final week of the festival, which ran from July 31 to August 17. In addition, film writers and scholars assembled to dissect the genre and its effect on global cinema at a "Spook and the City: Hong Kong Supernatural" panel.
Established in 1952, the festival has long had an "Accent on Asia" section that this year comprised 22 films - headlined by Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai's The Grandmaster - and "A Perfect Midnight" developed from that, Cossar said. "I was familiar with the tradition, but not to the degree that I became. It was a very fun and eye-opening process to really get into it," says the man who, together with artistic director Michelle Carey, programmed the 2014 MIFF's 244 feature-length works.
Spanning 10 venues across Melbourne's central business district, this year's festival included features from 53 countries.