Filmed in Singapore and produced by Cathay–Keris Films, the Pontianak film trilogy was immensely popular and well received by not just the Malay community but also both the Chinese and Indian communities in the region. In fact, its first instalment, Pontianak (1957), was the first film to be dubbed into Mandarin, whilst Sumpah Pontianak (1958) was the first local CinemaScope (also known as wide–screen) film to be formatted in Singapore. Since the release of the original series in the 1950s and early 60s, many prequels have been remade and produced, reflecting the popularity of the pontianak, which never waned in Singapore and the rest of South–east Asia even after many years of narrating the horrific legend of a pregnant female vampire which preys on men. The pontianak is viewed as a disruptive postcolonial feminist body who challenges and questions dominating power structures and seeks to overthrow colonial attitudes and dimensions with her undying vengeance and consciousness outside of the Western canon. I spoke to Rosalind Galt, author of Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization (2021), about embodying beliefs and traditions of the Malay World, the pontianak’s bloodbaths, the influence of feminist perspectives, and the female vampire’s stronghold in cinematic spaces and culture.
Lydia Wong–Plain
Lydia Wong–Plain
Rosalind Galt, Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization (2021)
Lydia Wong–Plain: In Alluring Monsters, you mention that the pontianak is ‘a terrifying, fanged monster (who) invites feminist interpretation’, and ‘certainly the foundation of the pontianak’s potency is her overthrowing of gender norms’. Could you tell us a little more about the pontianak and how this alluring figure came into light for you?
Rosalind Galt: The pontianak is a Malay spirit – or hantu – who is associated with birth. Women who have died in childbirth, or at the hands of male violence, run the risk of coming back to life as pontianaks. She is terrifying in part because she can look like a regular woman, and in fact is often imagined as beautiful and seductive. Thus, she’s a figure of anxiety especially for men, who fear that women might transform into monsters with long, dirty fingernails for scooping out intestines. I first encountered the pontianak in a series of incredibly popular horror films made in Singapore in the 1950s and 60s: these films were the most popular series made by Cathay–Keris studios, and subsequently copied by Shaw Brothers, who made their own series. These films were made during the years in which Malaysia and Singapore won their independence, and I was fascinated by why this figure from pre-colonial folklore had become an iconic movie star exactly in the moment of imagining a postcolonial future.
Rosalind Galt: The pontianak is a Malay spirit – or hantu – who is associated with birth. Women who have died in childbirth, or at the hands of male violence, run the risk of coming back to life as pontianaks. She is terrifying in part because she can look like a regular woman, and in fact is often imagined as beautiful and seductive. Thus, she’s a figure of anxiety especially for men, who fear that women might transform into monsters with long, dirty fingernails for scooping out intestines. I first encountered the pontianak in a series of incredibly popular horror films made in Singapore in the 1950s and 60s: these films were the most popular series made by Cathay–Keris studios, and subsequently copied by Shaw Brothers, who made their own series. These films were made during the years in which Malaysia and Singapore won their independence, and I was fascinated by why this figure from pre-colonial folklore had become an iconic movie star exactly in the moment of imagining a postcolonial future.
Yee, I-Lann. Like the Banana Tree at the Gate: Ibu or the Beast (2016) (Photo courtesy of artist)
Malaysian artist Yee I-Lann observes that ‘the pontianak continues to haunt us in 21st century patriarchal Southeast Asia’, and ‘is the woman standing at the gate like the banana tree in full view. She is potential and power and resource’ [in Tyler Rollins, ‘Like the Banana Tree at the Gate’, gallery brochure, 2016]. Why do you think the pontianak has evolved to represent feminist values? How does the pontianak disrupt, complicate and challenge patriarchal conventions?
I would argue that the pontianak has always represented feminist values! Of course, there is a way of seeing her as completely representative of patriarchal anxieties about women. The pontianak seems beautiful and demure, but she might turn on you and reveal her true, monstrous face. Likewise, the myth of the nail can be seen as extremely patriarchal. According to folk belief, if you hammer a nail into the neck of a pontianak, she can be subdued, and can even marry and have children. Only when the nail is removed will she return to her monstrous form. Like the stake in Dracula, the nail can designate a very violent way to subdue women via bodily penetration.
But, from a feminist perspective, a female figure who has the power to transform, to take revenge, and to induce fear is just as obviously appealing. It would be easy to transpose this ambivalence onto Western feminist film theory that sees both the patriarchal logic of cinematic narratives and the spectacular power of female characters. I think there’s something else at work with the pontianak, though. It’s not simply that the films are sexist and our contemporary readings are feminist. That disruption, that feminine agency, and that ability to wreak havoc on normativity all exist within Malay cultures. Yee I-Lann sees that intrinsic potential in the pontianak – her art brilliantly articulates the pontianak’s feminism but it doesn’t create it.
In Singaporean writer Alfian Sa’at’s short story ‘A Pontianak Story’ (2012) [collected in Malay Sketches, 2012], the protagonist encounters a pontianak. He jots down in his notebook that he ‘can also write about feminism: bloodsucking as draining the phallus of its hydraulic fuel. Hence male panic and impotence.’ Do you see her as a feminist figure who can exists in varying registers? Or simply an enigmatic one who is restrained and anchored by traditional definitions and known consequences?
I definitely see her as existing in varying registers. Alfian’s story really beautifully juxtaposes modern feminist and psychoanalytic perspectives with animist ones, and another fictional example I love is Zen Cho’s [short story] ‘The House of Aunts’, (2011) which imagines a Chinese pontianak who has a family of busybody aunties. In visual media, there are television versions like Ponti Anak Remaja (2009), where a group of teenagers find a pontianak and use their biochemistry class to help her survive in the human world. In fact, you can look back to the late colonial pontianak films and see a similar engagement with traditional belief, modern science, religion, and so forth. So although the pontianak is anchored in some ways by traditional definitions, popular culture can spiral out from that anchor in many directions.
You suggest that ‘the pontianak articulates feminist rage at injustice through the literary conjuring of a utopian violence and a wholly ironic mode of female apology’. You also propose the term ‘Pontianak Feminism’. Could you explain a little more about the pontianak’s ability to confront and reject patriarchal values and what ‘Pontianak Feminism’ represents? How does she disrupt feminist and queer conventions?
Many pontianak films disturb patriarchy. One of the best known films is Shuhaimi Baba’s Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam (2004), in which the heroine seeks revenge for her murder by an abusive man. More recently, Amanda Nell Eu’s It’s Easier to Raise Cattle (2017) imagines a young girl who looks up to a cool and vengeful pontianak as her best friend. But in developing the idea of Pontianak Feminism, I wanted to look beyond her obvious feminist agency and to think about how the figure demonstrates the intertwining of feminism and anticolonial histories. The idea of ‘Pontianak Feminism’ is an anti-colonial one. I don’t want to apply feminism to the pontianak, but rather to start from the pontianak and to consider what this Malay figure can teach us about feminism and about cinema. One of the ways to do this is to realise that Pontianak Feminism is not about gender in isolation, but necessarily thinks about gender in relationship to colonialism and modernity.
With the pontianak embodying pre-colonial attitudes and animist worldviews, she is a complex figure who embodies the entanglements of the past and present which encompasses both imaginative and factual narratives. Do you think the pontianak is constantly transforming to accommodate more nuances? How does the figure and visual culture of the pontianak blur the lines of not only the binary of Self and Other within local contexts but also the global sphere?
An important aim of the project was to contribute to theories of world cinema. In film studies, we still often begin with Western models (say, of the horror genre) and then add and expand with examples from outside Euro-American cinema. Refusing that model, I wanted to ask how we might frame world cinema if we began from Southeast Asian cinemas? Priya Jaikumar makes a similar argument, noting in her recent book [Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space, 2019] that knowledge is sometimes seen as geographically located and other times seen as universal. So I wanted to think about the pontianak film as opening onto major questions for world cinema: such as, for example, the value of animism for understanding postcolonial aesthetics. Critical theory in the West has drawn on animism as a mode of rejecting modernity, but it’s very much abstracted from embedded cultural beliefs. By focusing on Malay animism as a historical worldview, I see it as knowledge that is grounded somewhere specific, but that can speak about cinema per se. And it does change over time, as filmmakers and artists – and audiences – reimagine the living world.
Many see the pontianak as a champion of the colonised and repressed— what postcolonialist thinker Gayatri Spivak termed as ‘the subaltern’, colonised individuals who are typically violently silenced [see Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, 2010]. Do you agree with this and why do you many think South East Asian societies resonate deeply with her despite our incessant fear of encountering one? How does the pontianak shape identities?
Colonial horror often takes its monsters from the belief systems of colonised people – think about zombies or jinns – and this expropriation of indigenous beliefs to be turned into monsters is a practice of colonial aesthetics. We can see in many cultural contexts a postcolonial resistance to that structure, and a reimagining of horror film that sees spirits as champions of the oppressed. There is a lot of popular fiction in which pontianaks kill British colonial men, for instance. But what is really fascinating is the way the pontianak continues to represent the downtrodden in postcolonial contexts. For example, in Eric Khoo’s Folklore (2018) episode about the pontianak, the pontianak does not take revenge on her own long-dead killers but rather finds empathy for exploited Mainland Chinese and Indian construction workers in Singapore. The pontianak inspires love as much as she inspires fear, and that sense that she could speak where others cannot is a huge part of her enduring appeal and cultural complexity.
In your book, you also mentioned that the pontianak is ‘a figure of disturbance, whose formal and narrative effect is to unsettle dominant narratives of decolonization in Singapore and Malaysia’. Could you explain how this observation came about?
I started to see that pontianak films were not only speaking about gender but a whole range of questions that are actually some of the key issues in understanding decolonisation in Singapore and Malaysia. So there are tensions around gender and sexuality; but these aspects are also in relation to Islam and indigenous worldviews, race and national identities, tradition versus modernity, the environment and the politics of the forest. I realised that by centring the book on the figure of the pontianak, I could address a wide range of cultural and political histories. Moreover, often the dominant national narratives did not want to engage these issues substantively, or told reactionary or inadequate stories about belonging and difference.
Despite the pontianak deriving from Malay lore, the fear of encountering one transcends race, religion and cultural domains. Growing up in Singapore, we were told to never utter her name out loud for fear of her manifesting out of thin air and following us home. Unease also consumes us if an unexpected whiff of jasmine materialises out of nowhere. Such deeply ingrained horror still pegs us subconsciously despite the continuous engagement of science in debunking supernatural occurrences. What makes the pontianak a ‘cross–cultural figure’ and why do you think she still holds relevance and still haunts us all?
She is a cross-cultural figure because Malay culture has always been syncretic. Even the earliest historical artifacts of Malay culture refer to different languages and religions from across Asia, and I think that history of encounter and exchange has shaped something that is still meaningful in Singapore and Malaysia. Of course, the modern history of plural cultures in the region emerges from colonialism, and there are many ways we could criticise how race has shaped both nations in the postcolonial era. I think the pontianak calls back to an earlier era of cultural exchange, and something deeply rooted in the land of Southeast Asia – an experience everyone can share.
Anthropologists have always seen folklore as imperative in understanding culture as explained by Alan Dundes. He argued [in Interpreting Folklore, 1980] that ‘folk’ should not represent simply the past of groups of people from rural backgrounds. Do you think these figures or the pontianak have been ‘weaponised’ in the discussion of bigger issues and perhaps typifies a gentler approach in the discussion of sensitive socio-political dialogues?
It would be easy to assume that the pontianak is a straightforwardly ‘Malay’ and ‘folk’ figure, representing a distant folkloric past. But already, to see the figure as animist and pre-Islamic is to set up a problem, since Malay identity is so closely intertwined with Islam. She is Malay but not Muslim, and she equally belongs to both Singapore and Malaysia, so in this ‘folk’ figure, both national and ethnic identities are destabilised. Of course, both Malaysia and Singapore are cultures in which racialisation is a central facet of everyday life, and yet is very sensitive and hard to talk about. The pontianak is absolutely one of the ways that popular culture navigates these waters – whether it’s through observant Muslim pontianaks in popular film and television series or through transgender pontianaks who engage in more direct activism.
I would argue that the pontianak has always represented feminist values! Of course, there is a way of seeing her as completely representative of patriarchal anxieties about women. The pontianak seems beautiful and demure, but she might turn on you and reveal her true, monstrous face. Likewise, the myth of the nail can be seen as extremely patriarchal. According to folk belief, if you hammer a nail into the neck of a pontianak, she can be subdued, and can even marry and have children. Only when the nail is removed will she return to her monstrous form. Like the stake in Dracula, the nail can designate a very violent way to subdue women via bodily penetration.
But, from a feminist perspective, a female figure who has the power to transform, to take revenge, and to induce fear is just as obviously appealing. It would be easy to transpose this ambivalence onto Western feminist film theory that sees both the patriarchal logic of cinematic narratives and the spectacular power of female characters. I think there’s something else at work with the pontianak, though. It’s not simply that the films are sexist and our contemporary readings are feminist. That disruption, that feminine agency, and that ability to wreak havoc on normativity all exist within Malay cultures. Yee I-Lann sees that intrinsic potential in the pontianak – her art brilliantly articulates the pontianak’s feminism but it doesn’t create it.
In Singaporean writer Alfian Sa’at’s short story ‘A Pontianak Story’ (2012) [collected in Malay Sketches, 2012], the protagonist encounters a pontianak. He jots down in his notebook that he ‘can also write about feminism: bloodsucking as draining the phallus of its hydraulic fuel. Hence male panic and impotence.’ Do you see her as a feminist figure who can exists in varying registers? Or simply an enigmatic one who is restrained and anchored by traditional definitions and known consequences?
I definitely see her as existing in varying registers. Alfian’s story really beautifully juxtaposes modern feminist and psychoanalytic perspectives with animist ones, and another fictional example I love is Zen Cho’s [short story] ‘The House of Aunts’, (2011) which imagines a Chinese pontianak who has a family of busybody aunties. In visual media, there are television versions like Ponti Anak Remaja (2009), where a group of teenagers find a pontianak and use their biochemistry class to help her survive in the human world. In fact, you can look back to the late colonial pontianak films and see a similar engagement with traditional belief, modern science, religion, and so forth. So although the pontianak is anchored in some ways by traditional definitions, popular culture can spiral out from that anchor in many directions.
You suggest that ‘the pontianak articulates feminist rage at injustice through the literary conjuring of a utopian violence and a wholly ironic mode of female apology’. You also propose the term ‘Pontianak Feminism’. Could you explain a little more about the pontianak’s ability to confront and reject patriarchal values and what ‘Pontianak Feminism’ represents? How does she disrupt feminist and queer conventions?
Many pontianak films disturb patriarchy. One of the best known films is Shuhaimi Baba’s Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam (2004), in which the heroine seeks revenge for her murder by an abusive man. More recently, Amanda Nell Eu’s It’s Easier to Raise Cattle (2017) imagines a young girl who looks up to a cool and vengeful pontianak as her best friend. But in developing the idea of Pontianak Feminism, I wanted to look beyond her obvious feminist agency and to think about how the figure demonstrates the intertwining of feminism and anticolonial histories. The idea of ‘Pontianak Feminism’ is an anti-colonial one. I don’t want to apply feminism to the pontianak, but rather to start from the pontianak and to consider what this Malay figure can teach us about feminism and about cinema. One of the ways to do this is to realise that Pontianak Feminism is not about gender in isolation, but necessarily thinks about gender in relationship to colonialism and modernity.
With the pontianak embodying pre-colonial attitudes and animist worldviews, she is a complex figure who embodies the entanglements of the past and present which encompasses both imaginative and factual narratives. Do you think the pontianak is constantly transforming to accommodate more nuances? How does the figure and visual culture of the pontianak blur the lines of not only the binary of Self and Other within local contexts but also the global sphere?
An important aim of the project was to contribute to theories of world cinema. In film studies, we still often begin with Western models (say, of the horror genre) and then add and expand with examples from outside Euro-American cinema. Refusing that model, I wanted to ask how we might frame world cinema if we began from Southeast Asian cinemas? Priya Jaikumar makes a similar argument, noting in her recent book [Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space, 2019] that knowledge is sometimes seen as geographically located and other times seen as universal. So I wanted to think about the pontianak film as opening onto major questions for world cinema: such as, for example, the value of animism for understanding postcolonial aesthetics. Critical theory in the West has drawn on animism as a mode of rejecting modernity, but it’s very much abstracted from embedded cultural beliefs. By focusing on Malay animism as a historical worldview, I see it as knowledge that is grounded somewhere specific, but that can speak about cinema per se. And it does change over time, as filmmakers and artists – and audiences – reimagine the living world.
Many see the pontianak as a champion of the colonised and repressed— what postcolonialist thinker Gayatri Spivak termed as ‘the subaltern’, colonised individuals who are typically violently silenced [see Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, 2010]. Do you agree with this and why do you many think South East Asian societies resonate deeply with her despite our incessant fear of encountering one? How does the pontianak shape identities?
Colonial horror often takes its monsters from the belief systems of colonised people – think about zombies or jinns – and this expropriation of indigenous beliefs to be turned into monsters is a practice of colonial aesthetics. We can see in many cultural contexts a postcolonial resistance to that structure, and a reimagining of horror film that sees spirits as champions of the oppressed. There is a lot of popular fiction in which pontianaks kill British colonial men, for instance. But what is really fascinating is the way the pontianak continues to represent the downtrodden in postcolonial contexts. For example, in Eric Khoo’s Folklore (2018) episode about the pontianak, the pontianak does not take revenge on her own long-dead killers but rather finds empathy for exploited Mainland Chinese and Indian construction workers in Singapore. The pontianak inspires love as much as she inspires fear, and that sense that she could speak where others cannot is a huge part of her enduring appeal and cultural complexity.
In your book, you also mentioned that the pontianak is ‘a figure of disturbance, whose formal and narrative effect is to unsettle dominant narratives of decolonization in Singapore and Malaysia’. Could you explain how this observation came about?
I started to see that pontianak films were not only speaking about gender but a whole range of questions that are actually some of the key issues in understanding decolonisation in Singapore and Malaysia. So there are tensions around gender and sexuality; but these aspects are also in relation to Islam and indigenous worldviews, race and national identities, tradition versus modernity, the environment and the politics of the forest. I realised that by centring the book on the figure of the pontianak, I could address a wide range of cultural and political histories. Moreover, often the dominant national narratives did not want to engage these issues substantively, or told reactionary or inadequate stories about belonging and difference.
Despite the pontianak deriving from Malay lore, the fear of encountering one transcends race, religion and cultural domains. Growing up in Singapore, we were told to never utter her name out loud for fear of her manifesting out of thin air and following us home. Unease also consumes us if an unexpected whiff of jasmine materialises out of nowhere. Such deeply ingrained horror still pegs us subconsciously despite the continuous engagement of science in debunking supernatural occurrences. What makes the pontianak a ‘cross–cultural figure’ and why do you think she still holds relevance and still haunts us all?
She is a cross-cultural figure because Malay culture has always been syncretic. Even the earliest historical artifacts of Malay culture refer to different languages and religions from across Asia, and I think that history of encounter and exchange has shaped something that is still meaningful in Singapore and Malaysia. Of course, the modern history of plural cultures in the region emerges from colonialism, and there are many ways we could criticise how race has shaped both nations in the postcolonial era. I think the pontianak calls back to an earlier era of cultural exchange, and something deeply rooted in the land of Southeast Asia – an experience everyone can share.
Anthropologists have always seen folklore as imperative in understanding culture as explained by Alan Dundes. He argued [in Interpreting Folklore, 1980] that ‘folk’ should not represent simply the past of groups of people from rural backgrounds. Do you think these figures or the pontianak have been ‘weaponised’ in the discussion of bigger issues and perhaps typifies a gentler approach in the discussion of sensitive socio-political dialogues?
It would be easy to assume that the pontianak is a straightforwardly ‘Malay’ and ‘folk’ figure, representing a distant folkloric past. But already, to see the figure as animist and pre-Islamic is to set up a problem, since Malay identity is so closely intertwined with Islam. She is Malay but not Muslim, and she equally belongs to both Singapore and Malaysia, so in this ‘folk’ figure, both national and ethnic identities are destabilised. Of course, both Malaysia and Singapore are cultures in which racialisation is a central facet of everyday life, and yet is very sensitive and hard to talk about. The pontianak is absolutely one of the ways that popular culture navigates these waters – whether it’s through observant Muslim pontianaks in popular film and television series or through transgender pontianaks who engage in more direct activism.
A production still from Sumpah Pontianak (1958), directed by B.N. Rao, Cathay-Keris Films (Photo courtesy of Wong Han Min and Asian Film Archive)
Across the years the pontianak has been featured in countless horror films in Southeast Asia. Interestingly, she also appears in satire films being ridiculed in comedic and romantic subplots as seen in Tolong! Awek Aku Pontianak (2011) and Zombi Kilang Biskut (2017). How and what do you think encouraged this shift?
A big part of this shift can be explained by the trend toward genre hybridity in Malaysian cinema, and horror film in particular. Horror has really exploded in Malaysia in the last 20 years, to the point that it might seem strange to argue that there is still a certain cultural tension around the genre. Still, representations of the dead, or of spirits, jinns and hantu retain the power to unsettle religious sensibilities, and mixing horror with comedy has been one popular way to manage that difficulty. Even for audiences who are not highly devout, the pontianak is genuinely scary, and laughing at things we’re scared of can also be powerful. Huge horror comedy hits like Hantu Kak Limah (2018) demonstrate that this has been a winning formula for Malaysian filmmakers. Also, I’ve been arguing that the pontianak film is often politically progressive, and comedy and satire have also been significant sites of political engagement in these films.
A big part of this shift can be explained by the trend toward genre hybridity in Malaysian cinema, and horror film in particular. Horror has really exploded in Malaysia in the last 20 years, to the point that it might seem strange to argue that there is still a certain cultural tension around the genre. Still, representations of the dead, or of spirits, jinns and hantu retain the power to unsettle religious sensibilities, and mixing horror with comedy has been one popular way to manage that difficulty. Even for audiences who are not highly devout, the pontianak is genuinely scary, and laughing at things we’re scared of can also be powerful. Huge horror comedy hits like Hantu Kak Limah (2018) demonstrate that this has been a winning formula for Malaysian filmmakers. Also, I’ve been arguing that the pontianak film is often politically progressive, and comedy and satire have also been significant sites of political engagement in these films.
Hantu Kak Limah (2018)
You explained that the pontianak evokes a ‘vampiric decolonizing imaginary’ and ‘it tempers bloodthirsty revenge with cross-cultural bonds’. Could you speak more about the collapsing of distances between cultures and how the pontianak in cinematic spaces is a figure of activism and mediates global tensions?
I’ve already mentioned some ways in which we could see her as a figure of activism: feminist and transgender pontianaks, or pontianaks who take revenge on the perpetrators of racial injustice. But we might also look at the way that the pontianak is associated with forests and, specifically, those rainforests most urgently at risk from unchecked logging. These are truly global tensions, among the need for countries like Malaysia to leverage its natural resources within global capitalism, the dire consequences of this environmental degradation, and the animist worldview with which the forest and the spirits that dwell there might be better protected. Pontianak films are often set in and around forests, and I tried to develop a way of thinking about animism as cinematic form. When we see everything within the frame as imbued with the same semangat or spirit, then Western art historical distinctions of figure versus ground are not so relevant. In forest scenes, there is often little perspective or negative space, as tropical foliage fills the frame. Trees are important. In fact, Amanda Nell Eu went to ask ‘spiritual permission’ to film from the tree which was a focus of her film. Horror film might seem distant from global questions of environmental policy, but I see these films as mediating culturally our relationship to the earth.
Speaking about cinematic spaces, could you share with us more about the intricacy and complexities of the relationship between the pontianak and Malay Kampungs? Why do you think the Kampung plays such a pivotal role in the discussion of the pontianak?
The pontianak is a figure from pre-colonial and even pre-Islamic times in Malay cultures. She’s closely associated with the kampung, or rural village, in part because the kampung is also linked to a traditional way of life that is associated increasingly with the past. Some people think there may not be any more pontianaks in Singapore because the urban space is too modernised for them. But the kampung is not only a link to the pre-colonial past, but what that space evokes culturally. For some, the kampung suggests a conservative vision of traditional values, a patriarchal social order. Appeals to a kind of nostalgic kampung past can be compared to similar ideas about a phantasmatic conservative world before modernity in many cultures. The pontianak disrupts that fantasy, for example, reminding us of female social power in traditional Malay societies. In Revenge of the Pontianak (2019) by Glen Goei and Gavin Yap, for example, the pontianak takes revenge against all the village elders who have allowed her murderer to go free. The kampung is where we might expect to encounter a pontianak but it is also the space in which the films reimagine Malay cultural spaces.
Disputing the popular notion that Dracula or the vampire is a Western construction, you remarked that Bram Stoker ‘appropriated Malay indigenous narratives long before Malay cinema borrowed back European genre tropes’. Could you speak more about this?
I was fascinated to learn that one of Bram Stoker’s inspirations for the novel Dracula was a colonial travel memoir that described various Malay hantu including the pontianak. You can look at his notes and see that there are only three sources on different vampire-like creatures, so this was a significant influence. I was not the first to make this discovery, and my research here builds on the work of Stu Burns [‘Vampire and Empire: Dracula and the Imperial Gaze’, in eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics, 2017]. What seemed particularly relevant for me was that this major global figure of horror – Dracula – emerged out of colonial circulations. So where people sometimes describe the pontianak as ‘like an Asian vampire’, it would be more accurate to say that Dracula is like a European pontianak. This shift in perspective could change how we think about the history of horror film.
I’ve already mentioned some ways in which we could see her as a figure of activism: feminist and transgender pontianaks, or pontianaks who take revenge on the perpetrators of racial injustice. But we might also look at the way that the pontianak is associated with forests and, specifically, those rainforests most urgently at risk from unchecked logging. These are truly global tensions, among the need for countries like Malaysia to leverage its natural resources within global capitalism, the dire consequences of this environmental degradation, and the animist worldview with which the forest and the spirits that dwell there might be better protected. Pontianak films are often set in and around forests, and I tried to develop a way of thinking about animism as cinematic form. When we see everything within the frame as imbued with the same semangat or spirit, then Western art historical distinctions of figure versus ground are not so relevant. In forest scenes, there is often little perspective or negative space, as tropical foliage fills the frame. Trees are important. In fact, Amanda Nell Eu went to ask ‘spiritual permission’ to film from the tree which was a focus of her film. Horror film might seem distant from global questions of environmental policy, but I see these films as mediating culturally our relationship to the earth.
Speaking about cinematic spaces, could you share with us more about the intricacy and complexities of the relationship between the pontianak and Malay Kampungs? Why do you think the Kampung plays such a pivotal role in the discussion of the pontianak?
The pontianak is a figure from pre-colonial and even pre-Islamic times in Malay cultures. She’s closely associated with the kampung, or rural village, in part because the kampung is also linked to a traditional way of life that is associated increasingly with the past. Some people think there may not be any more pontianaks in Singapore because the urban space is too modernised for them. But the kampung is not only a link to the pre-colonial past, but what that space evokes culturally. For some, the kampung suggests a conservative vision of traditional values, a patriarchal social order. Appeals to a kind of nostalgic kampung past can be compared to similar ideas about a phantasmatic conservative world before modernity in many cultures. The pontianak disrupts that fantasy, for example, reminding us of female social power in traditional Malay societies. In Revenge of the Pontianak (2019) by Glen Goei and Gavin Yap, for example, the pontianak takes revenge against all the village elders who have allowed her murderer to go free. The kampung is where we might expect to encounter a pontianak but it is also the space in which the films reimagine Malay cultural spaces.
Disputing the popular notion that Dracula or the vampire is a Western construction, you remarked that Bram Stoker ‘appropriated Malay indigenous narratives long before Malay cinema borrowed back European genre tropes’. Could you speak more about this?
I was fascinated to learn that one of Bram Stoker’s inspirations for the novel Dracula was a colonial travel memoir that described various Malay hantu including the pontianak. You can look at his notes and see that there are only three sources on different vampire-like creatures, so this was a significant influence. I was not the first to make this discovery, and my research here builds on the work of Stu Burns [‘Vampire and Empire: Dracula and the Imperial Gaze’, in eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics, 2017]. What seemed particularly relevant for me was that this major global figure of horror – Dracula – emerged out of colonial circulations. So where people sometimes describe the pontianak as ‘like an Asian vampire’, it would be more accurate to say that Dracula is like a European pontianak. This shift in perspective could change how we think about the history of horror film.
Revenge of the Pontianak (2019) (Photo courtesy of Tiger Tiger Pictures)
To conclude, what do you think the future holds for the pontianak?
Selfishly, I should want her to go global and thus sell many copies of my book… but I think there is also something stickily local about her. For whatever reason, she hasn’t become a generic figure of Asian horror and I consider her localness to be very much part of her appeal. I would like to see more queer pontianak films, though. There are so many hints across the genre and it’s time for a boldly queer version of the story!
Selected pontianak filmography
Pontianak (1957, B.N. Rao, Singapore)
Sumpah Pontianak (1958, B.N. Rao, Singapore)
Anak Pontianak (1958, Roman Estella, Singapore)
Ponti Anak Remaja (2009, Nizam Zakaria, Malaysia)
Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam (2004, Shuhaimi Baba, Malaysia)
Tolong! Awek Aku Pontianak (2011, James Lee, Malaysia)
It’s Easier to Raise Cattle (2017, Amanda Nell Eu, Malaysia)
Zombi Kilang Biskut (2017, Mamat Khalid, Malaysia)
Hantu Kak Limah (2018, Mamat Khalid, Malaysia)
Revenge of the Pontianak (2019, Glen Goei, Gavin Yap, Singapore)
Selfishly, I should want her to go global and thus sell many copies of my book… but I think there is also something stickily local about her. For whatever reason, she hasn’t become a generic figure of Asian horror and I consider her localness to be very much part of her appeal. I would like to see more queer pontianak films, though. There are so many hints across the genre and it’s time for a boldly queer version of the story!
Selected pontianak filmography
Pontianak (1957, B.N. Rao, Singapore)
Sumpah Pontianak (1958, B.N. Rao, Singapore)
Anak Pontianak (1958, Roman Estella, Singapore)
Ponti Anak Remaja (2009, Nizam Zakaria, Malaysia)
Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam (2004, Shuhaimi Baba, Malaysia)
Tolong! Awek Aku Pontianak (2011, James Lee, Malaysia)
It’s Easier to Raise Cattle (2017, Amanda Nell Eu, Malaysia)
Zombi Kilang Biskut (2017, Mamat Khalid, Malaysia)
Hantu Kak Limah (2018, Mamat Khalid, Malaysia)
Revenge of the Pontianak (2019, Glen Goei, Gavin Yap, Singapore)