He Lives by Night

A killer who wears women’s clothes is following women who wear white fishnet stockings. The film places its fear inside the night life of the city; the radio, the night shift and emptying streets build the setting of the threat. Rather than a solution in the manner of a detective story, the account looks at the tension made by being watched and by going unnoticed. The killer’s change of clothes is used as the film’s principal instrument of fear; this was a common mould in the genre cinema of the eighties and it reads differently today. The film tries to run fear and comedy at the same time. Sylvia Chang and Simon Yam appear in Leong Po-Chih’s eighty seven minute Hong Kong film, completed in 1982.