Hong Kong's 'Apartment Horror' Films Turn Housing Crisis into Genre Cinema

A parking space in Hong Kong can sell for more than $500,000 — and that figure explains an entire film genre. In one of the world's least affordable housing markets, Hong Kong filmmakers have built a subgenre of "apartment horror," using high-density housing as a backdrop for superstition and socioeconomic anxiety.

Some residents live in subdivided units known as "coffin homes." The term is not metaphor. It names tiny partitions of larger flats, and it has crossed directly into the territory's cinema.

What makes these films distinctively Hong Kong?

"In Hong Kong, the ghosts and the spirits are trapped in the apartment with you," said Roy Tan, a screenwriter and filmmaker in the city. "You can't get out, and they can't get out either."

The line captures the subgenre's central premise: confinement. Ghost and tenant share the same impossible space.

The 2021 film "Coffin Homes," directed by Fruit Chan, is one example. It is a splatter-filled satire that bites into the absurdities of capitalism and the Hong Kong property market. Its plot reverses expectations — it is the ghosts who are displeased by the living attempting to share their quarters.

That reversal reflects a distinctly local superstition. In Hong Kong, a suspiciously cheap apartment signals that the unit was most likely the site of a tragedy or grisly crime. Low price is itself a warning.

Why do folk beliefs persist in a hyper-modern city?

The films draw on Hong Kong folklore, in which "it is generally believed that the dead live among us all the time," said Tobias Zuser, a lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Baptist University whose courses include discussions on global horror cinema.

"It's this wonderful contradiction between a hyper-modern city and the persistence of folk beliefs," Zuser said. He added that this means superstitions focus on appeasing ghosts rather than denying their existence.

The genre's stakes are therefore double. On one level, the films deliver shocks. On another, they register a housing market so strained that horror becomes its most honest description — a city where a parking space costs half a million dollars and where the dead, like the living, cannot afford to move out.

Takeaway: Hong Kong apartment horror fuses folklore with housing economics, making the city's property crisis visible through genre cinema.

As affordability pressure persists, the subgenre offers filmmakers a framework that keeps sharpening: every new price record supplies fresh material, and the ghosts, like the tenants, have nowhere else to go.