The afternoon recording experience made me realize that I definitely couldn’t miss capturing the rituals on the evening of the Ghost Festival. However, my father was strongly opposed to my idea of recording the event. His resistance was rooted in many traditional taboos, such as the fear of offending the spirits or disturbing our deceased relatives. My father’s adherence to traditional rituals is very strong, and despite my efforts, he did not agree to let me record the evening ceremony.
Under the red glow of the evening fire, the scene became even more beautiful. More people gathered to perform their rituals, with offerings being burned on the streets and in the corners by the walls. We joined the crowd once again to pay our respects. My father had paper offerings to burn for his uncle. In our family, we have shared ancestors, like my grandfather, but my father also has relatives on his side of the family, for whom he performs separate rituals. My grandmother is the one who buys and prepares all the offerings, carefully dividing them for each specific ritual.
The tradition of the Ghost Festival is to hold the rituals in the evening. As the candles flickered to life in the darkness and I pointed my camera at them, I instantly understood the atmosphere—an eerie, distinctly Chinese sense of horror emerged. Between the flames and the red candles, the stories about the gates of the underworld opening during the Ghost Festival suddenly felt vividly real.
Since I had already filmed the entire process during the day, I was completely captivated by the nighttime atmosphere and couldn’t stop recording it with my camera.
I shared the photos I took of the burning paper money in the dark with my mom. She mentioned that she had always noticed how beautiful the sparks from the burning paper money were, but she never thought to capture them with a camera. She always felt it was bad luck to keep such images. However, seeing me documenting everything so thoroughly, and even preserving the images of the burning paper money, made her realize that it’s just a part of the ritual, a product.