General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20264 min read

The Haunted Cop Shop

The Haunted Cop Shop (猛鬼差館; also released as Vampire Cop and The Haunted Cop Shop of Horrors) is a 1987 Hong Kong horror comedy directed by Jeffrey Lau and co-written by Lau and Wong Kar-wai, in which two bumbling Hong Kong police officers battle a resurrected Japanese vampire general loose in their station house.¹^•² It stars Jacky Cheung, Ricky Hui, Kitty Chan, and Billy Lau.³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	猛鬼差館 (Mang gwai chai goon)⁴
Release	Hong Kong, 19 November 1987⁵
Director and writers	Jeffrey Lau (director, co-writer); Wong Kar-wai (co-writer)¹
Principal cast	Jacky Cheung (Macky Kim), Ricky Hui (Man Chiu), Kitty Chan (Fanny Ho), Billy Lau (Sneaky Ming), Rico Chu (General Issei)³^•⁶
Production	In-Gear Film Production Co.; producer Alan Tang⁷
Hong Kong box office	HK$11,748,296, 27th place for the year⁵
Sequel	The Haunted Cop Shop II (猛鬼學堂, 1988), again co-written by Wong Kar-wai²

Spoilers

Plot

The story is set in a Hong Kong police station that was a clubhouse for Japanese soldiers during the occupation of World War II; after Japan's surrender, the officers committed ritual suicide there, and their spirits remained.³^•⁸ On the night of the annual Hungry Ghost Festival, when ghosts are said to be allowed one night's leave, the petty thief Sneaky Ming (Billy Lau), detained in the station, is lured by a female ghost and accidentally releases the undead General Issei (Rico Chu), who bites Ming and turns him into a vampire.³^•²

Police officers Macky Kim (Jacky Cheung) and Man Chiu (Ricky Hui) witness Ming's destruction by sunlight but are ridiculed when they report the resurrection, and they spend the rest of the film trying to prove the existence of the creatures of the night to their new superior, Fanny Ho (Kitty Chan).³ The climax has the pair confronting the vampire king and dispatching him with wooden stakes driven through his limbs and heart, followed by sunlight through a broken window.⁹

Genre position and style

Director Jeffrey Lau turned the jiangshi (Chinese hopping vampire of folklore) vampire genre on its head, moving it out of its usual Qing Dynasty village setting and into modern-day Hong Kong.³ The creatures are not the stiff hopping vampires of films such as Mr. Vampire (1985) but a variation on Western vampires with new powers, and the film borrows elements from Dracula (1931) and The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) while adding local urban ghost-story atmosphere.²^•¹⁰

The comedy is broad slapstick in the mo lei tau (hong Kong nonsensical, absurdist humor style) mode, with bawdy and sometimes tasteless gags, and reviewers have noted that the horror set pieces, including a ghostly mahjong game and a morgue sequence, work better than the jokes.²^•¹¹ Peter Ngor, cinematographer of Mr. Vampire, shot the film, and the music is by Alastair Monteith-Hodge and Anders Nelsson.⁶^•¹²

Production and reception

The film was produced by In-Gear Film Production Co., a company founded by Jeffrey Lau, Wong Kar-wai, and Alan Tam, and distributed by Golden Harvest; Alan Tang served as producer.¹²^•⁷ It was Lau's first film as director.¹³ Released on 19 November 1987, it grossed HK$11,748,296 in Hong Kong, ranking 27th for the year.⁵ Its success led to a sequel, The Haunted Cop Shop II (1988), and Lau reused the formula of comedy cops versus the supernatural in later films such as Thunder Cops (1989) and Mortuary Blues (1990).²

The film is now chiefly discussed as an early screenwriting credit of Wong Kar-wai, who went on to direct Chungking Express (1994) and In the Mood for Love (2000); critics note that the script shows none of his later stylistic trademarks.²^•¹⁴ User ratings sit in the low-to-mid range: IMDb lists 6.2/10 from 576 votes.¹

Home video

88 Films released the film on Region A Blu-ray in October 2026, restored in 2K from the original camera negative at 1080p, with the original Cantonese mono track, English subtitles, a commentary by Frank Djeng of the New York Asian Film Festival, a video essay by James Mudge, and alternate and extended shots from the Mandarin release version.¹³^•¹⁴

Notes on runtime

Sources disagree on the running time: Fortune Star lists 87 minutes, TheTVDB 91 minutes, the Hong Kong Film Archive 92 minutes, and JustWatch 95 minutes.³^•¹⁵^•¹⁰^•⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Horror films (individual works) › Comedy horror films › 20th-century comedy horror films

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

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