Haunting Soul from the Dark Building (1989)

aka Haunting Ghost from a Dark Building

aka Haunting Soul in an Old Building

The soundman (Chen Xiguang) of a mainland Chinese movie project lives in a run-down apartment building that features dubious neighbours, a sleazy and mildly threatening caretaker, and a cellar nobody has entered in years. It also has the most wonderful room sound in its staircase, so our soundguy does invite the film’s lead actress (Pan Jie) to walk up some stairs for him there when he’s not satisfied with the sound on set.

She’s got a creepy feeling in the place, though, and begins to have visions of the rape and murder of a teenager that must have taken place in that cellar during the Cultural Revolution (when nobody cared much about one murder more, the film suggests, somehow getting that past the censors). At the same time, the soundman is suddenly able to record bits and pieces of the future on his equipment. Thus drawn into the apartment’s mystery, the two team up to find out how killed the teenager.

All of this apparently excites the kid’s ghost quite a bit, and it begins haunting and killing people.

Haunting Soul is that rare example of an actual horror movie from mainland China. Stylistically and thematically, it is firmly anchored in the tradition of Asian ghost horror as I know it quite well from other countries in the area. Some of its ideas run parallel to those that would later make up the core of the J-horror explosion but never quite lead to as interesting and horrifying places as these later films would reach. But then, not being on the level of Kiyoshi Kurosawa or Hideo Nakata when he was at his best, is not such a terrible failure.

Yet, while they are clearly knowledgeable about the traditions of films about hauntings, and do like to borrow from those traditions, directors Mu Deyuan and Ming Liang seem at times somewhat insecure in their approach to horror cinema, perhaps on account of a certain lack of practical filmmaking experience with the genre in their national cinema. There’s a certain clumsiness and awkwardness in some of the horror scenes that isn’t helped by highly misguided ideas of how a flying doll head can be made creepy (note to directors: probably not make it look quite as much like it were on some very bad drugs), and sudden outbreaks of bizarre nonsense like the synth version of “Also sprach Zarathustra” that underlies a supposedly dramatic scene. Elements that, of course, make the whole affair pleasantly psychotronic even though they weaken its effect as a proper horror film.

On the other hand, Haunting Soul has moments of actual dream-like dread – everything having to do with the characters’ visions is particularly nicely done - and has quite a bit of fun with using the movie making background as part of its horror. It’s meta, but only as much as the film can actually carry without becoming completely silly.

The apartment location is wonderful as well, looking as Gothic as a modern building can look with its improbably large cellar, light that always threatens to turn the colours of horror and as many hand-placed artificial cobwebs as one can dream of. I also suspect some of this would look like a proper time capsule to the right Chinese audience; it does at least have that feeling from over here in Germany.

This being a mainland Chinese horror movie, there is, of course, the dreaded “natural explanation” for everything we’ve seen to appease the censors, but the directors clearly don’t care about convincing us they actually mean it. Seldom have I seen less effort and screen time sacrificed to this particularly kind of nonsense; so much so that the whole “it was all a tale mental patients told each other” bit feels more of a satire on rational explanation endings than a proper one.