The Descent Curse of Di Renjie
Directed by Fang YinghuaIn the first year of the Tianshou era, rumors of monsters and restless spirits spread as strange incidents erupt across the countryside. When a retired official, Jiang Biejia, is robbed and murdered during a highly ritualized ancestral-tomb ceremony, the dying man scrawls the words "Demon-Subduing Curse", insisting a "demon" will return to kill the true culprit in vengeance. Summoned to investigate, Di Renjie AKA Detective Dee traces the crime to a trail of missing relics: Jiang had recently paid a suspicious sum to a mysterious hunchback, Sun Tuobei, for a cache of "family treasures," which are then stolen in the attack. When Dee tracks Sun down, he finds him brutally slain as well, his home ransacked-evidence that someone is systematically erasing links in the chain. As fear of a ghostly curse grips the town, Dee pushes past superstition and follows the clues through deception, greed, and staged "hauntings," racing to expose the human hand behind the horror before more lives are taken.
