Juno Mak on RIGOR MORTIS

Juno Mak is a curious case of career re-invention. The man who was once a pop singing sensation now looks to take over the horror film genre by storm as a director. His feature film directorial debut Rigor Mortis, which was presented at the Venice Days selection of this year’s Venice Film Festival is the story of a washed up former film star who recently lost his wife and child, who moves into a tenement building full of evil spirits and malevolent creatures. It is a bizarre supernatural post-modernist tale, which pays homage to the Jiangshi genre, or Hong Kong vampire genre from the eighties. “I gathered all the elements of the genre, deconstructed in and reconstructed it,” said Mak after the screening at the Sala Darsena.

“The Jiangshi represented a big part of my childhood,” he continued. “I grew up in Vancouver and it is quite a boring place to grow up. So, I watched a lot of films to pass the time. Mister Vampire would represent a big part of my childhood. I think it represented the eighties of Hong Kong cinema, which is also a golden time period in the Hong Kong cinematic history.” In this film, Mak also makes use of some actors and actresses who would have starred in the films he pays tribute to. “I was given the chance to revisit the genre and I wanted to get the cast back. The reason why I chose theme is really because I wanted to tell the story of the fear – the fear of being forgotten. I thing that is a fear that we all face sooner or later in life.”

In fact, while Rigor Mortis may be a terrifyingly strange experience, it is also full of dramatic contexts and plenty of campy fun humour. “It’s not all about the visuals. It’s about life. I didn’t want to make a film that is purely based on vampires battling each other. There is quite a heavy drama that revolves around life. The world changes, people change and the genre hasn’t evolved since the eighties but has grown.” The setting of a Hong Kong tenement housing complex is also quite successful in conveying that feeling of feeling lonely without ever actually being alone. “It’s really the sense of loneliness that fascinated me. The characters are abandoned in a symbolic way. They are isolated but at the same time still have their own different individual stories. The place that was there was a public Hong Kong housing estate. We faced quite a lot of difficulties when we did the location scouting. We found places that looked great but were too small to put the camera in them. Not mentioning that there is a lot of action as well. So, only 20 per cent was shot on location, and the rest we built on a set”

The visual style is spectacular. The CGI is used in a very creative way, and it comes as no surprise when Juno Mak says that he wrote the script in half a year and shot the film in three months while, on the other hand, the post production lasted a whole year. “It was quite a struggle to produce a film in Hong Kong for that long. We have over six hundred shots of CGI. I guess they trusted me a lot because although I provided references and storyboards there was still a risk."

Rigor Mortis is an impressive first horror feature, hyper stylised and full of bizarre horrifying elements. In many ways, particularly in a visual sense, it is a wonderful updated version of a certain and more traditional kind of horror – a good mixture of old and new. After the screening, Juno Mak announced that his next project will be a collaboration with Takashi Miike, and considering the feel of Rigor Mortis which is reminiscent of the atmosphere and world of Miike’s, fans of the genre might just be in for a real treat. For now, however, with Rigor Mortis set for a big worldwide art house release, any fan should make sure to catch it.

-          Matt Micucci, 5/9/2013