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Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization

2023; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 82; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00219118-10291003

1752-0401

Gaik Cheng Khoo,

Linguistic, Cultural, and Literary Studies

Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization offers a refreshing, very contemporary, and comprehensive analysis of the evergreen Malay female monster, the pontianak, in film, television, and media from the 1950s to 2019. A female ghost who traditionally dies from male violence or childbirth, the pontianak appears as a beautiful woman with long black hair who turns into a terrifying fanged monster with supernatural power. Only a nail inserted to the nape of her neck can subdue her and turn her back into a normal woman. Usually located in the jungle near the rural village, she emerges from the past as a vengeful ghost to haunt the present and to seek social justice for the wrongs visited upon her. Galt argues that these make the pontianak a feminist animist figure that overturns gender norms and troubles modern Malay Muslim identity. Further, the pontianak films represent intersecting anxieties about femininity and modernity; local and transnational influences; and Islam's relationship to animism, globalization, and ecological destruction. These issues are divided into five chapters organized around popular horror and the anticolonial imaginary: gender, race and religion, who owns the kampung (village), and animism as form.Chapter 1 traces the cinematic history of the pontianak from the 1950s. That the eight studio-era pontianak films made by the two rival studios Cathay-Keris and Shaw Brothers were produced between the years of Malaya's independence from Britain (1957) and Singapore's Independence from Malaysia (1965) allows Galt to read the pontianak film as a site for struggles over postcolonial identity and notable tensions between nascent Malay ethnonationalism and pluralism. She discusses how Malay cultural identity is constructed, developed, and contested in these and later pontianak films. Their immense popularity with a racially diverse audience became a source of embarrassment for emergent nationalists and later Malay conservatives who regard hantu (ghost) films as backward, anti-Islam, and antirationalist. Therefore, even the pontianak's ontological status comes under question and in the last three studio films, the pontianak turns out to be fake. Yet the cultural belief in the folklore outlived the studio era. While some of the information and film history is not new, it is the way Galt configures these details and facts that is novel.Likewise harnessing existing feminist approaches, chapter 2 goes further by confronting the ideological ambivalence at the heart of the pontianak figure, as a symbol of feminist rage and liberatory power yet a passive beautiful woman, who would make a perfect wife and mother when “nailed.” Galt argues that the pontianak's violent agency is a reaction against the textual misogyny of a patriarchal system. Through sensitive close readings, she uncovers several revisionist films that pose the pontianak as Chinese, queer, and a girl's best friend. More importantly, the pontianak disrupts hegemonic ideas about race and national identity in postcolonial (Chinese-majority) Singaporean and (Malay Muslim–majority) Malaysian cinemas. Importantly these films, while read through psychoanalytical frames, also require knowledge about pertinent social issues and the region's histories to understand the racial and national allegories pontianak films enact.Chapter 3 focuses on race, religion, and Malay identity and shows affinities between the plight of the pontianak and the new racialized others: migrant workers and African students that are increasingly being represented in independent films as part of Malaysia's and Singapore's globalized ethnoscape. The pontianak's evolving relationship with Islam over the decades is also discussed because syncretism and the animism inherent in Malay culture contradicts Malaysian state–prescribed Islam.Chapter 4 turns to the kampung, the stereotypical space of Malay tradition associated with the premodern past. Galt argues that the pontianak film's kampung setting creates “a heritage imaginary” and that the folkloric horror and the heritage film share similarities such as setting, mise-en-scène, and narrative, which she analyzes. Becoming a heritage space, the kampung either acts as a conservative bastion against capitalist and Western modernity or a site of resistance for the pontianak as it hosts cultural practices banned by Muslim purists that give women roles as the keeper of tradition and heritage (the pontianak usually manifests as a dancer).Galt reserves the most exciting discussion for her final chapter, where she proposes “a pontianak theory of spectrality” that considers the aesthetics of the animist forest as part and parcel of her decolonial argument to centralize the pontianak film in world cinema. Impressive is her critical methodology that combines a posthumanist perspective with a visual art approach exploring “the relationship between human and nonhuman nature, between figure and ground, in the representation of landscape, in perspective and point of view, and in the imaginative constitution of space and place” (199). Suddenly, the background foliage assumes a localized meaning that is integral to the mise-en-scène and production design of the pontianak films. Unclaimed point of view shots are attributed to the forest and nature itself. Perhaps the strongest point for me personally is the position of animism as postcolonial ecology and the role of pontianak films in evoking this sense of the forest and wildlife lost to development, logging, and monocultural plantations.After reading this very rich decolonial book that explains how Bram Stoker was influenced by the pontianak, it would be difficult to regard the pontianak merely as a local vampire. The book's respectful treatment of the pontianak is reflected in Galt's in-depth intellectual engagement with Southeast Asian sociology, history, anthropology, and cinema, as she attempts to showcase the pontianak film as a legitimate film genre, one that critically merits intersecting its horror and gender framework with a postcolonial analysis. However, what makes the book so fascinating and unique is its fertile dalliance with contemporary scholarship in other fields like ecocinema and new animisms, which are gaining some momentum in Southeast Asian cinema.1 Thus, while providing a rich foundation for students of Southeast Asian cinema, the book also carries a broader appeal beyond Asian studies.