Enter the Dracula: The Bruce Lee Effect in Hong Kong Vampire Cinema

The Dracula Effect in Hong Kong Cinema: Part I

The Bruce Lee Effect

In 1973, important factors insure an unholy collaboration between East and West cinema of horror. In England, the end of a successfulbrucelee.jpg run of Hammer films about Dracula and the undead causes producers to look toward Hong Kong at the internationally success of kung fu films. Add the death of the first international Asian action superstar, Bruce Lee in the summer of 1973, and an opening gap was created in international cinema as the search for the next Bruce occurred. "No other figure in Hong Kong cinema has done as much to bring East and West together in a common sharing of culture as Bruce Lee in his short lifetime" (Tao 110).

His last film, Enter the Dragon (1973), was a jointly East/West production between Golden Harvest Pictures and Warner Brothers. The film was released after Bruce Lee's mysterious death, and ". . . is really an uneasy amalgamation of antithetical East-West sentiments" (Tao 117). For Warner Brothers, Enter the Dragon would become the biggest box office kung fu hit of all time, and for Western audiences, it would define Bruce Lee. [1]

Asian Audience Expectations

However, for Asian audiences, especially Hong Kong audiences, it was not as warmly received. "[I]t shows a sullen and sulking Lee forced to submit to the West's perception of him as a mere action hero. . . . he performs a cliched characterization of the reserved, inscrutable and humourless Oriental hero so often seen in Hollywood movies" (Tao 117). This perhaps demonstrates perfectly the problem of East/West muddling up of stereotypes and tropes since Bruce Lee personifies the segregated Oriental Exotic, fighting separately his foes.

With the death of Lee, the Hammer idea of genre mixing (horror and kung fu) became urgent as they negotiated with Shaw Brothers to make, what they hoped would be, cinematic history with Roy Ward Baker (1916- ) as the director. Unfortunately, the Hammer/Shaw collaboration would repeat some of the same mistakes as the Warner/Golden Harvest collaboration.

The Dracula Effect in Hong Kong Cinema: Part II

In Search of Cinematic Alchemy

Something magical or alchemical should have happened in The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires. By the end of 1973, filminghuman1.png directed by Roy Ward Baker (1916- ) began in Hong Kong on the Shaw Brothers lot with Chinese superstar David Chiang (1947- ) and British horror legend, Peter Cushing (1913-1994) as Professor Van Helsing.

Fu Manchu Like Dracula

Interestingly, plot wise, you have Dracula himself traversing to China and transforming physically into some type of Fu Manchu like Chinese Lord Kah, raping and sucking the local women dry. In some sort of strange homage to Seven Samurai (1954), you have seven brothers (and one sister) fighting the seven golden vampires and their army of zombies. "The film's central conflict is between two white Europeans--the Count and his old nemesis Van Helsing (Peter Cushing)--who, between them, enact a form of mythological colonization" (Hunt 164 ).

In a sense, the location of China becomes merely incidental as a space of exotic otherness, much like the way Hong Kong is treated by the British in many films, like Enter the Dragon.

The Dracula Effect in Hong Kong Cinema: Part III

Seven Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai 1954)

Unlike "Seven Samurai" (Shichinin no Samurai 1954) where the director, Akira Kurosawa (1910- 1998) introduces each samurai with his own personality, full of weaknesses and strengths, Seven Golden Vampires, does not go into psychological depth of each brother. Thus, flattened, they emerge as mere bodyguards or workers, protecting Van Helsing, who seems too feeble to fight.

The Dracula Effect in Hong Kong Cinema Part IV

Cult Film

Well, unfortunately the union between East and West met with unfulfilled consequences and became a quirky cult film hard categorize. The director of the film, Ray Ward Baker, felt more could have occurred in the films: "One could have done tremendous things with it, but (they) just didn't occur to me until after I'd shot the bloody thing!" (qtd. in Logan 103). Seven Golden Vampires did okay in England but not so well in Asia. Interestingly, Warner Brothers, who often owned the distribution rights of Hammer films initially, chose at first not to release it in America though it would later be released as the "Seven Brother Meet Dracula" (1979) with limited success.

Unholy Union

Thus, this concluded the unholy union between East and West. Though the undead tried to rise up and conquer China in the film, no such spirits from the film would rise up and conquer the Asian cinematic world. Instead, "The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires" remains a disappointment and points out how the problems with East/West productions continue on with cultural miscues and misguided cliches. "While it may not be accurate to describe . . . as a good film. It's certainly a memorable one" (O'Brien 11). Dracula and his Western baggage did fail to impress Asian audiences. Being neither a good vampire film nor a good kung fu flick, neither Eastern nor Western audiences hungered for more. The film itself muddles into a hungry ghost. Though the execution of this hybridity of horror was flawed, the idea was not, especially the part about mixing martial arts and vampires, for this would return in the future along with respect for an Asian authenticity of metaphysics.

A version of these notes entitled "The Blood of Hybridity in Postmodern Cinematic Asian Vampires" was presented at the Popular Culture Conference in Boston, Massachusetts on April 4, 2007. These notes are being published as a chapter in a future anthology of Dracula essays.

[1] Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) would pass Enter the Dragon as the biggest martial arts money making film of all time and even become the biggest money making foreign film of all time.

Van Helsing to the Rescue

Unfortunately, the film concludes with Van Helsing (Peter Cushing), whose kung fu is terrible, saving the day and fighting the vile Dracula, who unluckily or luckily transforms from the agile Chinese Fu Manchu/kung fu master Kah into a sort of old, club-footed European being. Dracula, the powerful, cannot seem to walk straight and merely trips straight onto the spear clumsily held by Van Helsing and dies, anti-climatically, without much of a fight. What a sad, pathetic, and boring ending with no rising crescendo of violence! Bruce Lee turned in his grave. Instead of a masterfully executed climax, the film ends in a whimper.

Action sequences, representing the battle between good and evil, can be entertaining. Often equally important for Asian audiences is how the cinematic heroes combat their own inner demons, just as Siddhartha had battled his own inner demons to become enlightened. Buddhism teaches that everyone is responsible for his or her own karma or actions. Since people have the opportunity to liberate themselves, this is the ultimate battle that must be overcome. "Instead of emphasizing the duality between good and evil, Buddhism distinguishes between wholeness and unwholeness (kusala/akusalamula)" (Loy). By fighting such demons, one becomes whole or more rounded. Even for Western action films, an interesting three dimensional villain makes for a better film.

Conference in Boston, Massachusetts on April 4, 2007.

Works Cited

Logan, Bey. Hong Kong Action Cinema. London: Titan Books, 1995.

Loy, David. "The Three Poisons, Institutionalized." Tikkun. 22.3(May/June 2007).

O'Brien, Daniel. Spooky Encounters: A Gwailo's Guide to Hong Kong Horror. Manchester: Critical Vision Book, 2003.

Teo, Stephen. "Ghost, Cadaver, Demons, and Other Hybrids." Hong Kong Cinema. London: BFI Publishing, 1997.219-229.

Quoted in article>

Thank you for reading.

"Enter the Dracula: The Silent Screams and Cultural Crossroads of Japanese and Hong Kong Cinema" became a chapter in the book "Dracula, Vampires, and Other Undead Forms," edited by Caroline Joan Picart and John Edgar Browning, my former student.