Hong Kong apartments can be terrifying. And it’s not just their price tag.
The city — where a parking spot can fetch more than half a million dollars and some people are forced to live in subdivided accommodation known as “coffin homes” — is one of the least affordable property markets on the planet. This tension has given rise to a subgenre of Hong Kong horror films in which high-density housing is a spooky backdrop for exploring superstition and socioeconomic anxieties.
“In Hong Kong, the ghosts and the spirits are trapped in the apartment with you,” said Roy Tan, a screenwriter and filmmaker in the city. “You can’t get out, and they can’t get out either.”
One “apartment horror” movie, “Coffin Homes” (Fruit Chan, 2021), is a splatter-filled satire that bites into the absurdities of capitalism and the Hong Kong property market. In the film, it is the ghosts who are displeased by the attempts of the living to share their space — a glimpse into a very Hong Kong superstition, where a suspiciously cheap apartment is a sign that it was most likely the site of a tragedy or grisly crime.
The films are steeped in Hong Kong folklore, in which “it is generally believed that the dead live among us all the time,” said Tobias Zuser, a lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Baptist University whose courses include discussions on global horror cinema.
“It’s this wonderful contradiction between a hyper-modern city and the persistence of folk beliefs,” he said, adding that this means superstitions are more focused on trying to appease ghosts than denying their existence.
While there is no shortage of spirits in apartment horror films, the real dread often comes when people try to break into the Hong Kong property market — something that “Dream Home” (Pang Ho-cheung, 2010) makes explicit.
The film’s main character spends her whole life working multiple jobs to save up for an apartment, only for the owners to hike up the price at the last minute. That sends her on a prodigiously gory killing spree that, sure enough, ends up lowering the price of homes in the building. As the film says in its ominous opening screed: “In a crazy city, if one is to survive, he’s got to be more crazy.”
Yung-Hang Bruce Lai, a film critic, researcher and programmer from Hong Kong, said that horror films are an effective vector for this brand of social commentary because they illustrate the tension between what you want and what you can’t get, particularly in the city’s housing market. “Anxiety and desire are two sides of the same coin,” he said.
