Censored ghosts: Chinese cinema’s complicated relationship with the supernatural
After exploding in popularity during the 21st century, Chinese cinema is now firmly established as the world’s second-largest market behind only the United States, with local productions comfortably out-grossing the movies being released by Hollywood.
It’s a highly isolated territory, though, with almost every single ticket for Chinese films being sold on local soil. In every year since 2019, at least one feature produced in the country has ranked among the ten highest-grossing titles globally, and the commonality is that none of them make much of a splash outside of the nation’s borders.
Hollywood movies don’t tend to fare as well in China as they did even a few years ago, and some of them don’t get past the censorship board at all. One of the easiest ways to be denied a theatrical rollout is to incorporate spooks, spectres, ghouls, or ghosts of any kind, but it’s a lot more complicated than a simple ‘no things that go bump in the night rule’.
Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest were all refused a Chinese release because they contained spirits. It’s a practice that dates back to the 1920s when The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ were banned for utilising gods, deities, and superstitions.
The idea of the afterlife—and, by extension, ghosts—has been hugely important to Chinese culture, folklore, myth, and legend for thousands of years. Whether they’re being used as literal or metaphorical vessels for storytelling, however, trying to tell a ghost story and have it seen by a wide audience is a lot easier said than done, regardless of where the production originated.
Director Kai Ma thought he was about to buck the trend of an entire generation when his horror film The Possessed was acquired by distributors and scheduled for a theatrical bow, only for his supernatural festival favourite to be pulled from the calendar less than a week before it was set to premiere.
The official party line was “technical reasons,” but it was heavily implied what the issue was. It’s accepted as a way of politely telling the public that the government said so, and it’s been applied as a blanket term to ghost stories for almost a century. For a population where millions upon millions of residents carry that belief system, the authorities have gone out of their way to ensure it isn’t even tangentially realised on the big screen.
According to the Film Administration Regulation, movies are flat-out forbidden from showing anything deemed to be “propagating cults and superstition”. And yet, Pixar’s Coco – which quite literally spends the majority of its running time in the afterlife where the protagonist doesn’t deal with anyone who isn’t a ghost – made it past the censors with no questions asked.
It’s a curious addendum to an already complex relationship. Still, the overriding theme is that spirituality, the idea of life after death, or the manifestation of spirits either affable or malevolent, isn’t going to be approved for release unless it’s a whimsical, emotional animation that tugs on the heartstrings, apparently.
