General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe

Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe (九层妖塔, Jiu ceng yao ta) is a 2015 Chinese action-adventure fantasy film directed and co-written by Lu Chuan, adapted from the novel Ghost Blows Out the Light: The Ancient City of Jingjue (鬼吹灯之精绝古城) by Zhang Muye, who writes under the pen name Tianxia Bachang.¹^•² It was released in China on September 30, 2015, grossed about $106 million, and became the subject of a copyright lawsuit in which the novel's author ultimately prevailed on appeal.¹^•³^•²

Key fact	Detail
Chinese title	九层妖塔 (Jiu ceng yao ta), released in China as Gui Chui Deng Zhi Jiu Ceng Yao Ta¹
Director and writers	Lu Chuan (director, screenwriter), with Bobby Roth and Nick Roth; based on the novel by Zhang Muye (Muye Zhang)⁴
Release	September 30, 2015 (China); US video release July 5, 2016 by Well Go USA¹
Box office	$106,380,000 worldwide, all from China; The Numbers lists $99,120,000 for the same territory³^•¹
Lead cast	Mark Chao as Hu Bayi, Yao Chen as Shirley Yang, Rhydian Vaughan as Chen Dong⁴
Key crew	Cinematographer Cao Yu; composer Jesper Kyd⁴
Awards	5 wins and 1 nomination, including a Golden Angel Award for Best Director at the Chinese American Film Festival⁵
IMDb rating	5.1 out of 10⁶

Spoilers

Plot and source material

The story begins in 1979 at a construction site in the Tanggula Mountains, an offshoot of the Kunlun range, where workers uncover a cavern holding huge skeletons of ancient creatures. An explosion brings a group of volunteer soldiers, including Hu Bayi (Mark Chao) and the nurse Yang Ping (Yao Chen), into the underground site. They break into a temple built by an alien civilization, the Demon Pagoda, where Hu Bayi is bitten by a firebat and left with a deadly curse. He returns to Beijing as the only survivor, falls under the protection of a secret organization, and years later learns that Yang Ping has reappeared, prompting a search for her in the desert and for the truth of her resurrection.⁷

The source novel, first published in February 2006, is a tomb-raiding adventure about treasure hunters called "mojin xiaowei" who use feng shui knowledge to explore tombs, and it attracted tens of millions of readers.² The film departs from it substantially: the story background was changed to an alien civilization, and the two leads became descendants of superpowered aliens, changes that drew strong objections from the novel's fan base.² Chinese press coverage before release warned readers that the plot had been "shattered" in adaptation and bore little resemblance to the book, with the buried nine-story demon tower of the novel becoming a sealing tower and the heroine Shirley Yang changed from a Chinese-American photographer to a mysterious woman of foreign blood able to subdue monsters.⁸^•⁹^•¹⁰

Production and visual effects

Lu Chuan, previously known for films such as City of Life and Death, made Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe his first foray into the fantasy genre.¹¹ The visual effects were managed by Prime Focus World's Beijing facility and completed by the company's Mumbai VFX team, and the film's effects work was described in a KPMG industry report as establishing a new benchmark for VFX in the Chinese film industry.¹² Chinese reviewers singled out the creature work, particularly the red hound monster Hong Hou, whose fur, musculature, and movement were judged nearly flawless even in brightly lit scenes.¹⁰

Lu Chuan later said the film was planned from the start as the first of a trilogy, with a sequel in preparation set in 2016, thirty years after the oil-town sequence. He put the budget at 90 million yuan, said about 300 shots had been cut for lack of money and time, and argued that the film's ambition was to attempt Hollywood-level effects with a complete fictional worldview as the foundation for a series.¹³^•¹⁴

Box office and reception

The film opened first at the daily Chinese box office on September 30, 2015, and passed 600 million yuan within ten days, the best commercial result of Lu Chuan's career to that point.¹³ Final grosses are reported differently: Box Office Mojo and filmdb list $106,380,000, all from China, while The Numbers lists $99,120,000 for the same territory.³^•¹⁵^•¹

Reception was sharply divided. On review and ticketing sites the film scored poorly, with 5.8 on Gewala, the lowest of all films then in release, and 5.5 on Mtime, below its holiday competitors.¹⁶ Its IMDb rating stands at 5.1 out of 10.⁶ Yet a China Film Art Research Center audience satisfaction survey for the 2015 National Day release window gave it a freshness score of 81.4, the highest of the window, which the survey attributed to audience interest in the film's genre and visual effects.¹⁷ Critics who defended the film credited its effects and its exploration of the monster-movie genre; critics who attacked it argued the story could not keep up with the technology and that the adaptation had discarded the novel.¹³^•¹⁸ A 2016 academic comparison with the Korean monster film The Host judged that The Host had successfully localized the classic Hollywood narrative formula while Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe focused too heavily on explaining the structure between reality and the surreal, weakening its heroic characters.¹⁹

At film festivals the film won five awards and received one nomination: the Golden Angel Award for Best Director for Lu Chuan at the Chinese American Film Festival, Jury Awards for Best Director, Best Actor (Mark Chao), and Best Film at the China Image Film Festival, a Special Jury Prize for Chen Yao at the China Australia International Film Festival, and a Gold Aries Award nomination for Best Cinematography for Yu Cao.⁵

Copyright dispute

Zhang Muye sued China Film Co., Ltd., Dream Author Pictures, Le Vision Pictures, and Lu Chuan in the Xicheng District People's Court, seeking 1 million yuan and arguing that the film distorted and mutilated the novel and omitted his attribution.²⁰ In June 2016 the first-instance court found that the four defendant companies had infringed his right of attribution but not his right to protect the integrity of the work, dismissed the remaining claims, and held that Lu Chuan as director bore no liability.²⁰

On August 8, 2019, the Beijing Intellectual Property Court reversed the integrity-rights finding on appeal. It held that the three companies' adaptation of the novel into the film infringed both Zhang Muye's right of attribution and his right to protect the integrity of the work, and it ordered the defendants to stop distributing the film, publicly apologize, eliminate the effects of the infringement, and pay 50,000 yuan in compensation for emotional distress. Some defendants stated they would seek a retrial.²

Place in the Ghost Blows Out the Light franchise

The film is one of two competing 2015 adaptations of the novel series: Wuershan's Mojin: The Lost Legend was made from the same books with a different studio, creative team, and cast, and Lu Chuan's film reached theaters first, though it is set earlier in the books' chronology and is not a prequel to the Wuershan film.²¹ The adaptation rights had been split, with the first four novels sold to the company behind Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe and the later volumes to Wanda Pictures, which produced Mojin: The Lost Legend; the two films earned 682 million and 1.678 billion yuan respectively in 2015.²² Streaming guides list Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe as the first of 18 films in the Gui Chui Deng (鬼吹灯) series, followed by titles such as Mojin: The Worm Valley (2018).²³ Lu Chuan later drew on the film's secret organization, Bureau 749, for a separate project.¹⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026