Jiangshis always have been fascinating to me especially as a youth. I remember running around the front yard with some neighbor kids and we’d play a game where one would hop around as the Jiangshi and the rest of us would run around trying to escape being capture killed and turned into a jiangshi. When the jiangshi got close we’d freeze and hold our breath which would give us immunity. It was our way of playing tag but in retrospect, an even cooler way of playing it than the traditional.
Always on the hunt for a good jiangshi film. Two classics that come to mind are Encounters of the Spooky Kind (spoiler alert, here’s a link to the fight scene, its one of the best of all time) and Mr Vampire (here’s a link to the intro of the film). At the time of writing we just finished both parts of Shaolin vs Evil Dead which has its bizarre and perplexing moments, both good and bad but the early 2000s CGI is spectacularly awful. Please write in the comments if there are any hidden gem jiangshi films we should know about!
The second iteration of the Jiangshi t-shirt from THEWWW is centered around the NES game Phantom Fighter (here’s a review of the game from SNES drunk). In Japan this was actually a licensed game based on the film Mr Vampire but did away with it or any mention of the movie once the game came state side.
This is where things get a little interesting. In true experimental fashion, there are TWO different versions of this shirt. We’ll just call one the ‘SUPER’ version and the regular won’t have affixed any special labels. The ‘SUPER’ version is really made as an experiment so quantities are very limited. These are oversized direct to garment printed front and back on 7.5 oz blanks, and the front graphic is post screen printed with clear glow in the dark ink by The Droid. These were a lot of fun to experiment with and to make.
The standard Jiangshi t-shirts are direct to film heat transfers that will be made to order on beefy 6.1 oz t-shirts. The films are durable with a high wash count, although its always recommended to wash cold and air dry when possible to lengthen the life of the print. The prints on both front and back are standard sizes without glow in the dark.
The Shadow Boxing with the Liu brothers and the Taiwanese Hello, Dracula series gets forgotten about, but it's not a top contender by any means.
Era of Vampires is another classic, written by Tsui Hark