Abstract

This chapter focuses on the myth of the pontianak, a female monster from Malaysia's animistic past. The essay focuses on depictions of the pontianak in a series of Malaysian folk horror films from 1957 onwards, the year Malaysia achieved independence from British colonisation. The chapter explores the reimagination of the creature as folk horror after centuries of marginalisation. I argue that the pontianak's surprising reconfigurations refract cultural anxieties of the collective national unconscious and illustrate how a legacy from prehistory functions as flexible tradition in the modern era. The endless adaptability of the pontianak myth ensures the creature's continuing relevance while illuminating how folk horror is a vehicle for the flexible re-articulation of the pontianak.

Keywords: pontianak, Malaysian cinema, folk horror, collective unconscious, myth

The pontianak is a female monster from Malaysia's animistic past. By focusing on the myth of the pontianak, this essay explores how its reimagination as folk horror in twentieth century cinema after centuries of marginalisation incurs surprising reconfigurations of the creature that, in turn, refract cultural anxieties afflicting the collective unconscious. I illustrate how a legacy from prehistory functions as flexible tradition, the endless adaptability of which ensures its continuing relevance in the present. The chapter expands upon folklore scholarship by scholars such as Simon Bronner (2016) and Dorothy Noyes (2012) to articulate how cinematic performances of the pontianak myth engage with a collective unconscious and participate in the repertoire of flexible tradition.

The essay is divided into four sections. The first involves the marginalisation of the pontianak myth prior to the twentieth century and examines how the myth would be rescued from further attrition precisely at the turn of the century when orientalist Walter W. Skeat's influential anthropological study Malay Magic was published in 1900. Skeat's study is also considered in order to underscore its importance to the pontianak myth, a significance that goes beyond its role as the first physical documentation of the tradition. More importantly, this section clarifies what a pontianak is to provide a model to facilitate comparative exploration of the figure's depiction in Malaysian folk horror. Investigating the revision of the pontianak myth in the last two centuries foregrounds the adaptability of traditions to evolving contexts.

The focus of this essay is the vampire in Asian cinema. By vampire, I do not mean a monster native to Asia that academic and popular writings have come to associate with it, like the Filipino aswang or the host of blood-drinking Indian demons (such as the vetala, the yakshi and the rakshasha), but Dracula himself – or rather a vampire based on Stoker's design. His representation, moreover, can be direct or indirect: obviously a replication of the Anglo-American prototype, or a hybridised configuration, like the Malaysian pontianak and the Chinese jiangshi, that nevertheless palpably manifest his characteristics (usually his fangs and blood-drinking). As we shall see, the latter strategy can sometimes transform the hybrid into an effective motif bearing allegorical implications, but at others potentially undermine the cultural meaningfulness of the film. Hence, the subject of my inquiry is Asian cinema's appropriation of Stoker's vampire as a Western icon itself. Admittedly the lack of films featuring Dracula or a Dracula-hybrid potentially signals the lack of the phenomenon's importance to the development of Asian horror. However, my concern here is not so much with how often Dracula appears in Asian films (although I will briefly address this point) but why he appears at all. By clarifying the symbolic role Dracula performs in Asian horror films, I hope to establish a possible reason why he is adopted as a motif other than the allegation that his appropriation is mainly for profit.

This chapter explains Dracula's apparent adaptability to Asian cinema. After briefly reviewing Dracula's claim as a pre-eminent symbol in Anglo-American popular culture, I demonstrate Dracula's inherent versatility and ambiguity as a symbol capable of accommodating multiple, constantly shifting and even contradictory meanings corresponding to the nation's evolving culture at different points in history. As I will argue, it is precisely these qualities that render his ideological loyalty uncertain on the one hand and enable his transcendence of national borders to become a transnational, multicultural symbol on another, and hence his attractiveness to Asian cinema. This chapter also considers a common, if deleterious, perception regarding twentieth-century Asian horror (with the exception of Japanese and Korean or J- and K-horror) that could also apply to Dracula's presence in its films.