Notable examples include Wu Ma’s excellent martial arts horror The Dead and the Deadly (1982) and Hung’s own smash-hit Mr Vampire horror comedy series, which he began producing for his own Bo Ho Films production company in 1985.

Hung’s script for Encounter of the Spooky Kind is surprisingly tight. He plays “Courageous” Cheung, a braggart who discovers that his wife is having an affair with local bigwig Master Tam (Huang Ha).

Realising that the loud-mouthed Cheung might shame him by telling everyone about the affair, Tam persuades him to test his courage by spending the night at a haunted house during the Hungry Ghost Festival. What Cheung doesn’t know is that a fat si – a Taoist master of the mysterious Maoshan sect who is skilled in magic and necromancy – played by Peter Chan Lung will remotely animate some dead bodies to kill him.

Hong Kong martial arts cinema: everything you need to know

The plan goes wrong when Cheung meets a rival fat si (Chung Fat) who teaches him some folk magic techniques that will save him from any murderous cadavers he encounters. These tricks include depositing 50 hens’ eggs into a coffin to trap the corpse inside.

When his plan fails, Tam has Cheung wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of his wife. Cheung escapes, and the scene is set for the film’s tour de force – a “spirit boxing” battle in which the two fat si possess the living bodies of Cheung and his adversaries for a masterfully choreographed and highly original kung fu performance.

Hung had been working his way up the career ladder since the late 1960s and was well known to Hong Kong audiences by 1980. Kung fu capers like 1977’s Iron Fisted Monk, in which he acted and directed, made his name, and Yuen Woo-ping’s 1979 Magnificent Butcher made him a star. The success of Encounter of the Spooky Kind transformed Hung into a force in Hong Kong cinema.

Hung had trained at the China Drama Academy, a Peking opera school, with Jackie Chan and Yuen Biao as a child, and the roots of Encounter of the Spooky Kind lay in ghost stories he had been told at the school.

“When I was in the Peking Opera school, I heard a lot of ghost stories. People would tell them to us, and I found some of them really frightening,” Hung told the US television programme Cinema AZN. “Even back then, I thought that it would make a good film – mixing comedy with action and ghosts.”

Hung returned to the idea in 1980, when he was looking for something new to film, he said, noting that most of his colleagues in the film industry thought the mixture of horror and kung fu comedy would fail. “I was really happy when the film was a success, as everyone said it would not do well.”

The spiritual kung fu, or spirit boxing, shown in Encounter of the Spooky Kind was a novelty for Hong Kong viewers, as it had received scant representation in local martial arts films. It had only previously been depicted in Lau Kar-leung’s Spiritual Boxer (1975) and Spiritual Boxer 2 (1979), which were coincidentally the first-ever kung fu ghost comedies.

The practice of spirit boxing is not a fiction, and it has a basis in real traditions and beliefs. Spirit boxing is a mixture of mysticism, magic, and martial arts that is mainly known through its association with the Boxers in the Boxer rebellion, the anti-Christian, anti-foreigner uprising that took place China from 1899 to 1901.

The Boxers had developed a mystical form of martial arts training which involved spiritual possession and cult-like practices. Spiritual boxing is thought to have been suppressed by the martial arts societies in China in the early 20th century because it went against the grain of the Buddhist and Confucian philosophies that underpinned their practice.

Although frantic, the spiritual kung fu at the end of the film cleverly incorporates Chinese mythology into the action, and Cheung’s fat si first turns him into the Monkey King from the literary classic Journey to the West.

The Monkey King is regarded as a near-invincible fighter, and Hung fittingly performs monkey kung fu in this incarnation – Hong Kong has its own style of monkey kung fu, which he had explored. His adversary in this sequence wields a hoop – this represents the magic bracelet of the powerful mythological hero Nezha, which was able to increase in size to be used as a weapon.

The film’s “bouncing” corpses, which appear more like zombies than ghosts, are also based on a real tradition. They became well known through the Mr Vampire series, but have their origins in Chinese folk mythology. Chinese tradition maintains that a deceased person should be buried in his or her hometown, so that their life in the next world can be aided by the ritual ministrations of family members.

According to an intriguing essay about superstition by critic Ng Ho called Abracadaver, Taoist fat si in Hunan province used their magic powers to work as “corpse drivers” to transport dead bodies back to their hometowns.

The fat si placed yellow scrolls on the foreheads of the corpses which allowed him to animate them. He would then tie them together with a rope and walk them back home. “While on the ground, they bounce rather like a frog, or a sparrow,” Ng notes – a form of movement that is fully replicated in Encounter of the Spooky Kind.

In this regular feature series on the best of Hong Kong martial arts cinema, we examine the legacy of classic films, re-evaluate the careers of its greatest stars, and revisit some of the lesser-known aspects of the beloved genre. Read our comprehensive explainer here.