The Spooky Bunch

Watch for

• How Cantonese-opera performance spills out of the stage and into the film’s supernatural imagery, making theatre itself part of the haunted space.
• The use of Cheung Chau as more than a location: streets, ritual spaces and island geography become an enormous backstage where old and new coexist.
• Josephine Siao’s comic timing and physical energy, which let the film move between fear, farce and emotional sincerity without settling into one mode.
• The pauses between supernatural set pieces, where Hui and Joyce Chan spend time with troupe dynamics and generational frictions rather than treating characters as disposable horror victims.

Production notes

The Spooky Bunch grew from an unusually deliberate attempt to change who held creative power on a Hong Kong set. After returning from studies abroad, Josephine Siao founded Hi-Pitch and sought to create a production led by women in an industry still dominated by men. She produced the film and brought together director Ann Hui and screenwriter Joyce Chan, extending the psychological and supernatural interests of Hui’s debut The Secret into a far more comic register. HKFA’s 2026 restoration program identifies Joyce Chan, Siao, production manager Chui Po-chu, associate production manager Tina Liu and art director Rebecca Lee Lok-sze among the key female creative team. The result is not simply a feminist production anecdote attached to a conventional genre movie. The film’s sensitivity to female characters, performance labor and backstage community is woven into the way it reclaims Cantonese opera—an art form then considered old-fashioned—as a source of cinematic invention for the youthful New Wave.

Trivia

• Josephine Siao produced the film through Hi-Pitch, a company she founded after returning to Hong Kong from studies abroad.
• HKFA describes the production as deliberately led by a female creative team, including Ann Hui and screenwriter Joyce Chan.
• The film was made in 1980, at the beginning of the movement now identified as the Hong Kong New Wave.
• Josephine Siao later paid for restoration work on an earlier print; HKFA premiered a new 4K digital restoration in 2026.
• The story’s Cantonese-opera milieu links a tradition that had fallen out of fashion in the 1970s and 1980s with the formal experimentation of the New Wave.

Legacy

The Spooky Bunch has become more valuable with distance because it complicates the neat story that the New Wave was a clean break from an old studio culture. Hui’s film argues almost the opposite: new cinema could be created by looking harder at local forms that modernization had declared obsolete. That approach anticipates much later Hong Kong filmmaking, where genre, memory, performance tradition and disappearing neighborhoods are constantly folded together. It also broadens Hui’s representation in the Top 100. Her importance is not only the seriousness of Boat People, Song of the Exile or A Simple Life; it is also her capacity to move through horror, comedy, opera, melodrama and social observation without losing her eye for people. The 2026 4K restoration by HKFA is further evidence that the film is no longer a marginal curiosity but a work actively being restored to the city’s visible film heritage.