In an essay concerning the 1970s kung fu craze, film scholar David Desser draws attention to a curious cultural phenomenon, pinpointing an unprecedented moment in motion picture history when three foreign releases topped the US box-office charts (2000). Those three films – Fists of Fury (aka The Big Boss, 1971), Deep Thrust: the Hand of Death (aka Lady Whirlwind, 1972) and Five Fingers of Death (aka King Boxer, 1972) – ranked first, second and third among all North American theatrical releases during the week of 16 May 1973, and that initial success paved the way for what Desser refers to as the ‘high point’ of martial arts cinema's commercial dominance the following month (Desser 2000: 23). Indeed, during the week of 20 June 1973, the above trio of releases was joined by several other Hong Kong productions, including Duel of the Iron Fist (aka The Duel, 1971), Kung Fu: The Invisible Fist (1972) and Thunderbolt Fist (1972), which not only contributed to Stateside audiences’ growing interest in Chinese martial arts but also similarly foregrounded – through their English-language titles – the centrality of hand-to-hand combat in the iconographic constitution of the genre. Subsequent productions such as the Shaw Brothers’ Shaolin Hand Lock (1978) further solidified the cultural imaginary of kung fu cinema, which has since been codified as a physically balletic and graceful, if also violently bloody and brutal, genre defined in part by the persistent presence of deadly thrusting hands.

Of course, hands are also central to another type of cultural production, one that, within China, has often incorporated kung fu action and martial arts iconography. Although the genre can be traced back to the earliest years of Cantonese-and Mandarin-language sound film production (1930s), Hong Kong's horror cinema began to gain international prominence in the 1970s and 1980s, thanks to the circulation of works that were at least partially inspired by jiangshi fiction – literary texts featuring sundry forms of reanimated (or ‘hopping’) corpses and (un)healthy doses of scatological humor. With examples ranging from Yiu Hua Hsi-men's Demon Strike (1979) and Sammo Hung's Spooky Encounters (1980) to Hwa I Hung's Kung Fu Zombie (1982) and Sun Chung's Human Lanterns (1982), horror films from that period played upon local and global audiences’ familiarity with genre conventions, including the tendency to showcase human and non-human hands as both embodied and disembodied manifestations of physical danger or psychological dread.