Bewitched

Kuei Chih-Hung more or less opened the Shaw Brothers black-magic cycle with this, a couple of years before his own delirious Boxer's Omen. A man stands trial for murdering his own daughter and pleads that he was bewitched, and the film flashes back to the gu sorcery worked on him: a jilted Thai magician, insects under the skin, corpses puppeted from a distance, and the Taoist priest who takes the curse on. It runs on the queasy, tactile grossout the Hong Kong occult films made their signature, all maggots and boiled ingredients and things crawling where they should not. Coherence comes a distant second to sensation, and the sensations are memorably foul. A key link between the Thai-magic scare pictures and the full-blown Cantonese gross-out horror that followed.