This chapter seeks to unpack the politics of the local in Hong Kong horror films as a contested site of cultural production where different players – film-makers, producers, audience and the ‘market’ – perform in orchestrated dissonance. Cinematic horror in the cultural imagination of post-1997 Hong Kong gains in complexity as the film industry is increasingly integrated into the regulatory regime in Mainland China, which still harbours exceptional caution towards ideologically suspect films, which naturally include those that promote ‘superstition’ through the supernatural. In the heat of public debates over Hong Kong's purportedly endangered local identity and the erosion of the city's ‘high degree of autonomy’ after a series of political contentions (which culminated in the Umbrella Movement in 2014), the repercussions of decolonisation have found their way into the city's cultural imagination. Cinematic horror, both as a vehicle of the popular cultural imagination and as a contested site of identity politics, is seen as both an artistic embodiment of the social psyche and a tool to unpack its latent or repressed anxieties and fantasies. As blockbuster-type Hong Kong–China co-productions have become a market dominant, making horror films amounts to a risky business. While this trend may continue to prevail, there have been some fresh attempts to revitalise this popular genre and inject it with new meanings in the changing context of cultural politics in the city. Between 2012 and 2014 several low-to medium-budget horror films were released. Local audiences responded enthusiastically and many saw these as a sign of the resilience of the local popular culture to counter or at least deflate the Mainland market's grip on Hong Kong's film culture, if not cultural imagination and identity politics more broadly. Whether as a calculated move to appeal to this general sentiment under which a ‘niche’ local market for Hong Kong horror films is taking shape, or as a cinematic gesture of deviance and subversion, these films embrace a self-conscious ‘localness’ at the textual and meta-textual levels with cathartic political satires against the ruling regime. The following discussion will first trace the trajectory of Hong Kong horror through the pre-and post-handover decades, situating horror within the evolving discourse of identity and the issues of local histories and collective memory.