Split of the Spirit (1987)

 

Director: Fred Tan

Screenplay: Fred Tan

Cast: Siu-Fung Wong, Shu-Yuan Hsu, Shao-Kang Wu, Kuan-Chung Ku

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Split of the Spirit begins with a dance performance, of burning fire, the screen filled in red lighting, and shirtless oiled men performing around a female lead, beginning the film appropriately with a dynamic start. A Taiwanese horror film, this happily has an unconventional pace to its proceedings, starting with a romantic triangle between two women and a playboy named David Bao. Bao is an unscrupulous figure, when he dumps one named Lu Ling (Siu-Fung Wong), the female avant-garde dance choreographer we see perform at first, and our lead heroine, when he marries a wealthy socialite. The other woman suffers a worse fate, in mind Lu Ling attempts suicide with pills and ends up in hospital, in that not only does Bao have her killed, but gets a spiritualist named Master Li to lock her soul in her body to prevent her haunting him.

The ritual does not go to plan, as the mirror used within the act, setting a car on fire with her in it in a field, breaks and they lose a piece in the long grass. For Lu Ling, recovering from her suicide attempt and working in Taiwan on a new dance show, she literally bumps into the other woman in Bao’s romantic triangle, colliding with her ashes held by a grieving relation, which leads to the other possessing Lu Ling’s body to get revenge. From here, this follows the obvious plot threat, with a male reporter finding himself drawn into something suspicious going on, of revenge from beyond the grave against the transgressors, one-by-one. Fred Tan, the director-writer, comes into discussing this film with a tragedy more haunting than even this solid supernatural story, as he only made four films, in a variety of genres, one posthumously as he only died in his mid-thirties in 1990¹, all in a variety of different story types which offers a really tantalizing potential that he could have been special. Split of the Spirit is proudly a genre film at heart, a subdued one which waits until the right moments to embrace its melodramatic horror tropes, but his career included Lovers (1983), about a male escort who finds himself balanced between wealthier female clients, a gay friend and a woman he encounters; Dark Night (1986), an  infidelity drama, and Rouge of the North (1988), a period drama circa 1910 about a woman forced in society to marry a wealthy man and all the harshness of her life from this.

This immediately explains that, whilst this embraces is horror tropes proudly, this does emphasis the drama to the narrative, entirely from the perspective of two women who have been betrayed, one from the grave taking violent action but with the consequences, as a vengeful spirit, she will harm Lu Ling in the end as she will likely try to take her soul back to the afterlife. Considering that, with the ghost’s influence, she can lift a grown man like the mannequin he becomes for the shot of being thrown off a large apartment block floor soon after, this vengeance will not have any roadblocks in its way, but the real drama is for Lu Ling's situation itself. This for the most part is a subdued work, which makes the sudden jumps into pulpiness actually for the better. This has one entire sequence which, if done wrong, would have been tonally inappropriate, where suddenly like a Shaw Brothers horror film there is actress Siu-Fung Wong being moved about in a room with practical effects to suggest she is hovering, floating objects being thrown around, and in context the least expected decapitation with a blood geyser closer to a Japanese samurai film from the seventies. All of this, as in other scenes, does not yet stick out badly in what still plays as a drama first in its quiet nature.

This is a clichéd plot, but it is nice how all this content, alongside living up to this visual and visceral tone, is contrasted with the grounded tone, up until the finale at Lu Ling’s performance leading to someone having to go into the afterlife to bring her back, fully in the unnatural with the green screen effects and finally allowed to be with an appropriate build up. It is a film, steeped in the aesthetic of the late eighties, which has a grounded tone for a horror film capable of being this phantasmagorical and over-the-top but deals with it seriously in this matter-of-fact attitude. Here, in this Taiwanese setting, the banality against the bombast of certain scenes even goes as far as no one batting an eye at the supernatural content. Spiritualists and being able to connect to the dead are matter of fact, where the bigger concern, as Master Li learns, is that if you plan to assist in a murder and botch the ritual, your punishment will lead to someone, even if beyond the grave, for your crime.

And tragically Fred Tan was not able to continue with a long career as, whilst he clearly worked with drama greatly, he did an admirable job here with the horror genre. Without any sense of not feeling out of his comfort zone as the writer too, he fully embraced in more overtly heightened scenes even in terms of the aesthetic flourishes. Sadly as well Split of the Spirit is not easily available, a further tragedy in that, managing to counterbalance its more overt moments with its languid tone, this does have a distinct style to it and really is a film, as a Taiwanese horror film, that would be appreciated by quite a few people.

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1) Fred Tan's BFI.org profile.