ABSTRACT
A famous maxim from The Analects of Confucius decrees: “Confucius is loath to discourse on the monstrous, the violent, the occult, and the numinous!” In millennial China, political censorship dictates a shunning of critical subject matters in the moment. Contemporary creative energy has thus been channeled into the very areas the ancient sage had demurred: either diving into ancient tombs in Gothic fantasies of web novel Ghost Blows Out the Light (2006) and its 2015 filmic spinoffs, or lifting off into space in the science-fiction short story “The Wandering Earth” (2000) and its 2019 cinematic adaptation. Despite trappings of apocalyptic, hyperbolic motifs and computer-generated extravaganza, despite underground and stratospheric apparitions, millennial Chinese imaginary on tombs and space predictably returns home to traditional, even conservative, family melodramas, romantic or filial or both.
