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Chilling snapshot of a long-gone Hong Kong in The Imp, film that’s a new-wave horror classic

Dennis Yu’s groundbreaking work retains its doom-laden sparkle with well-paced vignettes, it’s on-location shooting in an as-yet empty United Centre and elsewhere adding freshness to the genre

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Charlie Chin in The Imp.

Hailed upon its release as a new-wave twist on the traditional Cantonese horror picture, The Imp (1981) has both diminished and grown in the interceding decades.

Director Dennis Yu Wan-kwong’s tale of unfolding terrors connected to an upcoming birth proved such a pervasive influence on the late-20th-century Hong Kong ghost genre that its power to appal has necessarily, though not entirely, receded. But the abatement in shock value has had the salutary effect of focusing attention on what was previ­ously a less obvious accomplishment: the movie’s snapshot of Hong Kong life in the early 1980s.

Particularly in its first half, the film’s leisurely pace is spot-on in building up to the revelation of unimaginable truths concerning young security guard Ah Keung (Charlie Chin Hsiang-lin) and his pregnant wife, Lan (Dorothy Yu Yee-ha), as they await the arrival of their first child. The quotidian quality of these passages makes the eventu­al introduction of a Taoist master (Elliot Yueh Hua) all the more disturbing, the tone escalating from a naturalistically staged cemetery scene to progressively over-the-top mystical sequences.

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