The paradigms of the Hong Kong zombie film were established in pictures about goeng-si, beginning with Sammo Hung’s 1980 film Spooky Encounters and Ricky Lau’s 1985 picture Mr. Vampire. Though goeng-si films were marketed as pictures about “hopping vampires,” in truth early examples of this cycle are better considered as zombie-adjacent rather than vampire-adjacent. Goeng-si films represented a clash of the “old” and the “new” through the manner in which, employing a period setting, they drew on literary and folkloric antecedents while also inventing their own mythology. As the goeng-si film developed, Hong Kong’s cinema of the undead evolved into two distinct groups: firstly, pictures that embraced the “vampire” label and secondly, films that moved away from any suggestion of vampirism to focus on stories about reanimated corpses that have more in common with the “zombies” or “ghouls” of Western cinema. Later examples of the latter subgroup incorporated the key paradigms of the goeng-si film alongside elements of the contemporary police action films that were becoming increasingly popular within Hong Kong cinema. Key examples of this subgroup include Stephen Tung’s Magic Cop (1990) and Ivan Lai’s The Blue Jean Monster (1991). Both films draw on the paradigms of the 1980s goeng-si films while employing a contemporary setting that extends the conflict between “old” and “new” that underpins Hong Kong’s cinema of the undead.