General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Imp

The Imp (凶榜; Hung bong, also romanized Xiong bang) is a 1981 Hong Kong supernatural horror film directed by Dennis Yu (余允抗), about an unemployed man whose new job as a night watchman in a commercial building draws his pregnant wife into the path of a vengeful spirit seeking rebirth as her child. It was a critical and commercial success on release and is regarded as a key work of the Hong Kong New Wave's horror strand.¹

Key fact	Detail
Original title	凶榜 (Hung bong / Xiong bang); released in Hong Kong on 5 November 1981²
Director	Dennis Yu Wan-kwong, a Hong Kong New Wave director¹
Cast	Charlie Chin Hsiang-Lin, Dorothy Yu Yee-ha, Elliot Yueh Hua, Wong Ching, and Kent Cheng¹
Production	Century Motion Picture & Dist. Co., Ltd.; Cantonese language; 35mm color¹^•³
Runtime	100 minutes per the Hong Kong Film Archive; 95 minutes per IMDb¹^•²
Box office	HK$4,396,918, ranking 14th among Hong Kong films in 1981⁴
Festival recognition	Nominated for the Grand Prix (Best Film) at the 1983 Avoriaz International Fantastic Film Festival⁵

Spoilers

Plot

Keung (Charlie Chin) is unemployed and has a pregnant wife to support. He takes a job as a night watchman in a commercial building, but strange incidents begin and his fellow guards die in horrible ways one by one. A geomancer (practitioner of divination/feng shui based on landscapes) tells Keung that he will be the next victim and teaches him how to avoid his fate, while Keung begins to notice strange behavior in his wife.³ The title creature is a dead child who wants to return to life and, taking advantage of Keung's negative aura, possesses him and his wife in hopes of being reincarnated as their unborn baby.⁶

The story of a security guard haunted by impending fatherhood takes after Hollywood horror films such as Rosemary's Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976). Director Dennis Yu and his writers, Kam Ping-hing, Lee Tang, and Cheung Kam-mun, balance this Western influence with Chinese mystical beliefs and practices, staging Taoist rites with contraptions and orchestrated natural elements like fog, wind, and fire.¹

Production and the Hong Kong New Wave

Dennis Yu was born in Guangzhou in 1950, grew up and was educated in Hong Kong, and studied film at UCLA. He returned to Hong Kong in 1975, joined Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) as a screenwriter and producer, and made his directorial debut with See-bar (1980), placing him among the Hong Kong New Wave directors, the generation that transformed the industry from the late 1970s with new themes and cinematic language.⁷^•⁸

In 1980 Yu established Century Motion Picture & Distribution Co., Ltd., where he directed the controversial thriller The Beasts (1980) and then The Imp, which the Hong Kong Film Archive describes as the film that carved out his distinct place in horror cinema.⁷ The film was shot largely on location at United Centre, a tower block in Admiralty that was still empty at the time, and its contemporary urban setting distinguishes it from most rural Hong Kong ghost stories.⁹^•¹⁰

Style

The film is expressionist in approach, extending the characters' emotions into the mise-en-scène. The Hong Kong Film Archive notes its emphasis on visual effects, with green and red tones combined with smoke and lighting to create an atmosphere of dread, and its use of the enclosed spaces of the commercial building, such as elevators and dark corridors, to heighten a sense of entrapment.¹^•¹¹ Reviewers have also noted the intense green lighting and fog in its supernatural scenes.³

Unlike much Hong Kong horror of the period, which mixed scares with comedy, action, or erotica, Yu plays the material straight, avoiding parody and flatulent comedy sequences.¹⁰ Yu said in an interview that to direct a good horror film, one must scare oneself before terrifying the audience.¹² The film also grounds its lead couple in socioeconomic hardship, and critics have read its horror as tied to the economic insecurity of a family unable to afford private housing.¹³

Reception and legacy

The Imp was a critical and commercial success upon release, ranking 14th at the 1981 Hong Kong box office, and it helped set the tone for the many ghost films and vampire films that followed.¹^•⁴ Paul Fonoroff, a film critic who long followed Hong Kong cinema, observed that the movie shaped the late-20th-century Hong Kong ghost genre so widely that its capacity to horrify has inevitably, if incompletely, faded over time, and argued that this loss of shock has drawn attention to the film's portrait of Hong Kong life in the early 1980s.⁹ It was nominated for the Grand Prix at the 1983 Avoriaz International Fantastic Film Festival.⁵

The Hong Kong Film Archive screened the film in its 2017 "Revisiting the New Wave" program, and a restored version was screened at the 2026 Summer International Film Festival in Hong Kong, where it was described as a cult film regarded as one of Hong Kong's scariest.⁸^•¹² Yu's directorial career spanned roughly eight years and seven films in the 1980s, including Evil Cat (1986) and Vampire's Breakfast (1987), before he left the film industry in the 1990s to work in finance.¹²^•⁷

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) › Religious and demonic 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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