- Director
- Ching Siu-tung
- Year
- 1987
- Country
- HK
- Runtime
- 92 min
Also released as
- 倩女幽魂
- Sien nui yau wan
- Storie di fantasmi cinesi
- Histoire de fantômes chinois
- Sien nui yau wan 1
- 천녀유혼
- A Chinese Ghost Story
- 천녀유혼1
- Verführung aus dem Reich der Toten
- 倩女幽魂Ⅰ
- A Chinese Ghost Story Ⅰ
- Sien lui yau wan
- 倩女幽魂：妖魔道
- En spøkelseshistorie
- 倩女幽魂1
- A.Chinese.Ghost.Story.I
- チャイニーズ・ゴースト・ストーリー
- Una historia china de fantasmas
Filed under
A Chinese Ghost Story
A tax collector shelters in a haunted temple and falls in love with a ghost enslaved by a tree demon with a very long tongue.
Produced by Tsui Hark and directed by Ching Siu-tung, it is a wuxia romance, a comedy and a horror film simultaneously, and the tonal shifts happen mid-scene without warning.
Leslie Cheung is the naive clerk, Joey Wong is the ghost, and the tree demon is a several-storey creature whose tongue pursues people across the countryside.
The wirework and the practical effects are enormously inventive and the film moves at a speed western horror of the period never attempted.
It is adapted from a Pu Songling story from 1740, and Hong Kong cinema had been mining that collection for decades.
The romance is played completely sincerely, which is why the ending lands rather than being camp.
The numbers
Nobody has rated this yet. Be the first to make a claim you will have to defend.
Your call
Trailer
The sleeves
The same film, sold as a different film in each territory. Click any of them.
Where to watch
Australia
Germany
USA
Legal sources only. Availability data from JustWatch via TMDB.
Checked 9 Aug 2026
Discuss with AI
Open a chatbot with a question about this already typed out. Useful for a second opinion, a plot detail, or working out which cut you are holding.
Adjacent
WATCHdeep cutPenda's Fen
A BBC play about a repressed vicar's son in the English countryside, and it is one of the strangest things ever broadcast.
WATCHobscureBlood Rites
Andy Milligan shooting in Staten Island with a hand-held Auricon. An acquired taste nobody acquires.
WATCHobscureHellbender
Made by one family during lockdown for almost nothing, and it looks better than films with fifty times the budget.
WATCHobscureAttachment
A Danish-Jewish folk horror about a dybbuk, a mother, and a relationship the mother will not permit.
WATCHcultHuesera: The Bone Woman
Mexican, and the best pregnancy horror since Rosemary's Baby. The joint-cracking sound design is the thing.
WATCHcultTigers Are Not Afraid
Children orphaned by the Mexican drug war, three wishes, and the dead following them through the streets.