Kuei Chih-hung was born in Guangzhou on 20 December 1937 and, after finishing secondary school in Hong Kong, studied stage directing at the National Taiwan Academy of Arts. He shot films in his spare time with limited equipment, made the black-and-white animation Wu Song Beats the Tiger, worked on animation and assistant-directing in Taiwan, directed Taiwanese-dialect pictures such as The Weird Gentleman (co-directed, 1963), and served as assistant director to Peter Pan Lei on Shaw Brothers' Lover's Rock (1964) and Song of Orchid Island (1965). In 1965 he was sent to the Shochiku Ofuna Studio in Japan for training and, after returning, became assistant to the Japanese directors Inoue Umetsugu, Shima Koji and Nakahira Ko. When Ho Moon-hwa began shooting The Monkey Goes West (1966) he invited Kuei back to Hong Kong to join Shaw. In 1970 he took over Shima's unfinished Love Song of the South Sea, recasting Chin Feng in the lead; released as Love Song over the Sea, it was his first feature for Shaw. Further films followed, but it was The Delinquent (1973) — nominally co-directed by Chang Cheh but executed by Kuei — that opened the way. In 1974 he made The Killer Snakes, The Tea House and Ghost Eyes, the first bold in its treatment of sex and violence and the second drawing on Jiang Zhinan's social novels, both becoming talking points of Shaw's genre output; Big Brother Cheng (1975) continued the teahouse owner's fight against the triads. Between 1980 and 1982 he consolidated his reputation for horror and black magic with the Hex trilogy, Bewitched and The Boxer's Omen, while Killer Constable (1980) was his only period wuxia. At Shaw for over two decades he directed more than forty films, using florid camera movement and social criticism within commercial genres; he later emigrated to the United States and for a time ran a pizza shop, and died of liver cancer on 1 October 1999.
One of Shaw's most adventurous genre directors of the 1970s, Kuei fused realistic crime with occult horror in films from The Killer Snakes and The Tea House to the later Hex trilogy and Bewitched, forging a distinctive strain of Hong Kong cinema that has been revalued by fans in recent years.
Achievements
- 1973 · Directed The Angry Guest, opening up his career as a director
- 1974 · Directed The Killer Snakes, The Teahouse and Ghost Eyes in quick succession
- 1975 · Directed Big Brother Cheng, continuing the teahouse owner's fight against the triads