Sino-Enchantment: The Fantastic in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas

Although Chinese film audiences have always maintained a foundational cultural interest in the fantastic, this trend has dramatically increased over the last decade. Sino-Enchantment is the first work in English to approach this recent explosion of fantastic film in Chinese cinemas, where each re-envisioning of the form is determined by cultural, economic, political and technological factors to produce fresh inventions and creative reinventions of familiar narratives, characters and tropes. With case studies of films such as The Assassin (2015), Monster Hunt (2015) and The Great Wall (2016), this novel approach uses the framework of ‘Sino-enchantment’ as a new theoretical lens through which readers can engage with elements of the fantastic in Chinese cinema.