From the Shaw Brothers genre production line to the cycle of clones of Bruce Lee films that appeared in the wake of the superstar's death, Hong Kong cinema has long been seen as driven by raw commercial concerns. Like many other commercial film industries, most notably Hollywood, production in the Hong Kong film industry has also been focused on popular cycles of production. These have included phases when family melodramas, historical swordplay and kung fu films, screwball comedies and Triad-based crime films have all proved successful at the domestic and regional box office. As with other commercially focused film industries there has also been a low-budget sector within the Hong Kong business. Within this arena producers and directors have fashioned energetic, populist films that were designed to appeal to audiences’ desire for works that contained sex and violence. The horror genre is an ideal vehicle to satiate these needs. This chapter will explore the work of film-makers who worked at this ‘rougher’ end of Hong Kong horror in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. As well as placing them into this exploitation context of production, it will discuss their excessive content and the visual style employed by directors such as Kuei Chih-hung (The Killer Snakes, 1974, the Hex series beginning in 1980), Danny Lee and Billy Tang (Dr Lamb (1992)) and Herman Yau (The Eight Immortals Restaurant: The Untold Story (1993), Ebola Syndrome (1996)) to deliver their exploitative content.

Pete Tombs has noted that the 1970s saw a shift in the type and style of horror films produced within the Hong Kong film industry. He argued that in previous decades stories that revolved around ghosts and spirits had been prevalent but, ‘The arrival of the horror film in Hong Kong in the seventies coincided with a more explicit depiction of sex in locally produced movies. Several films explored the connection between the two in a uniquely Hong Kong fashion’ (Tombs 1997: 29). One of the ways in which that arrival was distinct was the fact that some of the rawer films – such as those of Kuei Chih-hung discussed below – were produced by one of the territory's major producers, the Shaw Brothers studio.