Uncle Nine 九叔
Uncle Nine from Mr. Vampire has a job he does better than anyone, and two disciples he's still a little afraid to entrust it to. Lam Ching-Ying played the Taoist master so well that he kept getting called on for similar roles, and decades later Chinese directors once again took the name Uncle Nine for their own stories about a master and his disciples.
Uncle Nine (九叔) first appears in Mr. Vampire (1985) by Ricky Lau Koon-Wai. When a family asks for a body to be reburied, the Taoist master notices that the corpse has not decomposed. Soon the dead man rises from his coffin. In Hong Kong cinema such creatures are called jiangshi. They move by hopping, and they can only be stopped with talismans and rituals. Lam Ching-Ying's character knows what to do, but his assistants are easily distracted, and he has to keep an eye on them too so they don't make things worse.
Lam went on to play mentors who know how to handle the supernatural more than once. In Magic Cop (1990) he helps investigate a case in a modern city. There his character is called Uncle Feng. Master Mo Siu-Fung in Vampire Expert (1995) has his own story too. Audiences recognised Lam's familiar mannerisms, even though the names and circumstances changed.
In the mainland film The Legend Returns (2020), Uncle Nine, played by Ge Shuai, travels with his students, heals people and gets to the bottom of strange deaths. The picture spawned sequels. In Jiushu The Night Madness (2021) the master is played by Liu Tie-Zhu. In both films, the hero's name alone tells the viewer who will be called for help when ordinary means can no longer handle the case.
