doi:10.1111/j.1467-9493.2008.00317.

Mapping spectral tropicality in The Maid and

Return to Pontianak
Sophia Siddique Harvey
Department of Communication and Theatre Arts, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, USA
Correspondence: Sophia Siddique Harvey (email: sophfeline@earthlink.net)

Contemporary, postcolonial Singapore has tamed, managed, and essentially disavowed its tropicality, aptly captured symbolically as the air-conditioned nation. This essay traces how two recent
Singapore horror films, The Maid (2005) and Return to Pontianak (2001), evoke the return of the
repressed as a form of haunting that I call spectral tropicality. The films image and imagine this
spectral return through unruly bodies (citizen subjects, female domestic workers, ghosts and
vampire-ghosts) and uncanny landscapes (the jungle and city). In particular, the films and this
analysis examine two sociocultural spectres lurking beneath Singapore as a tropical urban citynation: the female domestic worker (The Maid) and ethnoracial folk beliefs (The Maid and Return to
Pontianak). The Maid features the Hungry Ghosts Festival in the Chinese religious calendar, ghost
marriages and an engagement with yin and yang energies, while Return to Pontianak deals with
Malay folk beliefs of semangat (life force), and the pontianak, a female vampire-ghost. The Maid
attempts to integrate Chinese folk beliefs into contemporary Singapores cityscape, particularly the
architecturally conserved Chinatown shophouses, while Return to Pontianak displaces Malay folk
beliefs onto the tropical forest, which is mapped as a threatening other(ed) space and serves as
Singapores tropical doppelganger. Both films suggest that these folk beliefs have an unruly
presence within the states seemingly harmonious and meritocratic ethnoracial ideologies.
Keywords: spectral tropicality, Singapore, The Maid, Return to Pontianak, horror, folk beliefs, the
uncanny

Introduction
When former Singapore prime minister (now minister mentor), Lee Kuan Yew, was
asked by the Wall Street Journal in 1999 to comment on what he perceived to be the most
important invention of the millennium, he remarked:
The humble air-conditioner has changed the lives of people in the tropical regions . . . Before
air-con, mental concentration and with it the quality of work deteriorated as the day got hotter
and more humid . . . Historically, advanced civilizations have flourished in the cooler climates.
Now, lifestyles have become comparable to those in temperate zones and civilization in the
tropical zones needs no longer lag behind (George, 2000: 14).

What is perhaps most interesting and problematic about Lees response is the way in
which it is uncritically infused with a colonial moral meteorology (Livingstone, 2000:
936) in which the temperate, imbued with values of progress, modernity and urbanization, is valued over the tropical (Arnold, 1996: 142; Driver & Yeoh, 2000: 15).
Singapore has become, in Singaporean media academic and journalist Cherian Georges
(2000) prescient phrase: the air-conditioned nation. In this air-conditioned nation, the
tropical is tamed, controlled and regulated. State policies of land use, urban redevelopment and conservation are in service of Singapores continued economic success and
growth. It is a garden city with what geographer Joshua Comaroff (2007: 56) describes
as an authoritarian putting-green aesthetic. The state, however, cannot disavow either
Singapores tropical climate or its location within Southeast Asia. It cannot perform an
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 29 (2008) 2433
2008 The Author
Journal compilation 2008 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd

Mapping spectral tropicality, Singapore

25

act of geographical prestidigitation to share its borders with those advanced civilizations
that have flourished in the cooler climates. This colonial valuation of the temperate
over the tropical evokes Singapores ambivalence with the tropical urban and raises a
number of salient questions. Namely, whose voices and bodies are rendered visible in
order to speak, live, participate and contribute to Singapore as a self-styled tropical
garden city of apartment blocks and skyscrapers (Perry et al., 1997: 191) and as a
city-nation? (also see Butler, 1993).
In this essay, I discuss two recent Singapore horror films, The Maid (2005), directed
by Kelvin Tong, and Return to Pontianak (2001), directed by Djinn (Ong Lay Jinn), to
tease out and work through these questions. The Maid tells the poignant tale of Rosa, a
Filipina maid who arrives in Singapore to work for the Teo family during the monthlong Chinese Hungry Ghosts Festival. All is not well in the Teo household as Rosa is soon
plagued by the spectral return of their former deceased Filipina maid. Return to Pontianak
(2001) revolves around Charity, an Asian-American woman who returns to Borneo in
search of her biological mother. A motley group accompanies Charity on this genealogical quest, on which she soon learns of her supernatural roots.
Tropical hermeneutics: mapping spectral tropicality
David Livingstone (2000: 92), in his afterword for the themed issue of this journal on
Constructing the tropics, argues, as does David Arnold (1996), that tropicality is as
much of a conceptual as a physical space and that the task of mapping that space . . . is
fundamentally an exercise in hermeneutic inquiry. I wish to conduct one such interpretive exercise by examining how these two Singapore horror texts frame (i) urban and
tropical spaces, (ii) geographical indicators of place, and (iii) the inhabitants that populate these urban and tropical spaces. Grounded in these horror film texts, I deploy the
idea of spectral tropicality to tease out and work through the ambivalence of the
tropical urban and the haunting of Singapores postcolonial climate.1
As a genre, horror possesses the potential transformative power to breach boundaries, unsettle categories, implode binaries and give shape to sociocultural anxieties
(Lim, 2001; Uhde & Ng-Uhde, 2003; Knee, 2005).2 Spectral tropicality unsettles vectors
of space, place and belonging, and what gives this form of spatiality a spectral sheen is
Freuds notion of the unheimlich or the uncanny.3 The uncanny is what has been
repressed and now returns (Freud, 2003: 1478) and what makes this form of dread
especially horrific is that a sense of the uncanny goes back to what was once well
known and had long been familiar (p. 124). Spectral tropicality sheds light on what has
been repressed in this air-conditioned nation and what now returns in the form of
disruptive places, landscapes and bodies. Both The Maid and Return to Pontianak image
and imagine this uncanny space a space infused with ghostly apparitions, demonic
incarnations, haunted structures and eerie jungles. More specifically, The Maid and
Return to Pontianak, through their filmic narratives and visual designs, attempt to exorcise two spectres lurking beneath Singapores status as a tropical urban city-nation.
Spectres: female domestic worker and ethnoracial folk beliefs
The first spectre, that of the female domestic worker, thrives under the shade of
Singapores baroque ecology (Ong, 2004: 178), a socioeconomic ecosystem where
certain forms of labour, knowledge, populations, capital and industries (biotechnology
and engineering) are privileged by the state to promote its knowledge-based economy. In
this baroque ecology, female domestic workers, unlike biotechnology or engineering

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Sophia Siddique Harvey

specialists, are excluded from ever becoming permanent residents or citizens of

Singapore. These domestic workers form part of a spectral labour economy an economy
that is an invisible yet integral presence to ensure the smooth and efficient functioning of
the air-conditioned nation. The central protagonist of The Maid is a young woman from
Bicol, a small village in Luzon, northern Philippines, who arrives to work for the Teo
family during the seventh month of the Chinese lunar calendar popularly dubbed the
Hungry Ghost month and the narrative begins to unfold through her point of view.
The second spectre is the presence of folk beliefs within a secular city-state and how
these folk beliefs are aligned along ethnoracial categories. The Maid features the Hungry
Ghosts Festival in the Chinese religious belief system, ghost marriages and an engagement with yin and yang energies, while Return to Pontianak displaces the Malay folk
beliefs of semangat (life force) and the pontianak, a female vampire-ghost, onto the
jungle, which is mapped as a threatening other(ed) space. These folk beliefs serve an
unruly presence within the states seemingly harmonious and meritocratic ethnoracial
ideologies.
My reading of The Maid suggests that the majority Chinese-Singaporean populace
participate more visibly, and are more easily represented, within Singapores urban and
city life. Return to Pontianak, with its vampire-ghosts, bomoh (a traditional Malay healer)
and eerie jungle, represents a more regional haunting that hints at Singapores often
conflicted and uneasy position within the Malay Archipelago, one in which Singapores
dominant immigrant Chinese population reside (Turnbull, 1989). The representations
and associations of the Chinese with urban spaces of trade and commerce and of the
Malays with more rural environments and rural employment can be traced back to
colonial Singapore (Perry et al., 1997: 302).4 This allegorical frame also speaks to
Singapores traumatic birth as an independent nation in 1965 after its expulsion from
the Federation of Malaysia and its rural hinterlands. One of the reasons behind this
expulsion was the fear that Singapores urban, Chinese majority population would
upset the racial balance of power within the Federation. Return to Pontianak and The Maid
offer a working through of this postcolonial haunting and national ambivalence, where
Malay folk beliefs are firmly contained and displaced within a rural, untamed, tropical
space and cannot be reconciled nor represented within Singapores urban space, its
baroque ecology and its national imaginary of a first world city-nation.
The Maid: spectral labour ows
In The Maid, Singapores reliance on domestic workers for the smooth operation of its
economy is sutured to the Philippines and the economic dependence on the remittances
that these women send back to their relatives. This spectral flow of anthropologist Arjun
Appadurais (1996: 3343) ethnoscapes and finanscapes finds its material expression in
The Maids living protagonist, Rosa Dimano, and through her immaterial doppelganger,
Esther, a murdered Filipina domestic worker.
The film opens with a prologue that intercuts images from the Hungry Ghost month
(scenes and sites of worship, ritual and performance) with (i) an album of seemingly
random black and white passport photographs of young women whose bare faces stare
straight ahead: only their names, set in a generic typeface, provide any biographical
information Desy Selviana, Tissa Mawartyassari, Ary Firmansyah, Emmie de Guzman;
and (ii) shots of the now ubiquitous icon of Singapores residential architecture: HDB
(Housing Development Board) flats. The black and white passport photographs evoke
the ceaseless flow of migrant female domestic labour pouring into Singapore. The sheer

Mapping spectral tropicality, Singapore

27

volume of human traffic threatens to strip these womens identities and erode their
subjectivities.
These faces belong to the approximately 150 000 women from the region (in
particular Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka) who possess two-year employment visas. Women are compelled to leave their native countries for a host of reasons
that include a search for more lucrative employment and to better their families
standards of living. In return, they provide domestic services (including childrearing
and elder care) for roughly one out of every seven households in Singapore (HRW,
2005: 2). By placing these photographs in the prologue, director Kelvin Tong therefore effectively illustrates the extent to which female domestic workers are imbricated
as a necessary yet invisible presence within Singapores sociocultural and socioeconomic landscape. Tong acknowledges this invisibility when he speaks about the
impetus for the film:
They are often migrant workers without voices, without opinions . . . they are supposed to
come and work in a strange place, they are not supposed to have an opinion, they are not
supposed to speak unless spoken to, and they walk into a house, a new household. Theyve
never been there but yet that very night they are expected to sleep in a strange bed (The Maid,
DVD Special Features Commentary).

This prompts Tong to structure The Maid around Rosa Dimanos point of view: much of
what we learn about Rosa we learn through Tongs use of the subjective voice-over.
Rosa Dimano arrives in Singapore to work as a female domestic worker for the
Teochew-speaking and street opera-performing Teo family. As she journeys to the Teo
residence in a maid agency van, Rosa muses about her thoughts, fears and impressions
of Singapore in a series of voice-overs.
Accompanying these voice-overs are shots of Singapores built environment:
managed greenery (trees, shrubs, foliage), dense construction, the urban skyline, HDB
flats, the Esplanade Theatres by the Bay and a series of vignettes from Singapores
sociocultural landscape: a maid who carries her charges schoolbag while pulling the
child along behind her and groups of people celebrating the Hungry Ghost month by
burning incense, Hell money bills and candles on the pavement. The camera observes
these sights from Rosas perspective. The audience is therefore sutured into her exhilarating first glimpses and impressions of Singapore in which she remarks that Singapore
is a place shes always heard about with tall buildings and beautiful streets, where
everything was so clean and wonderful. Rosa is an embodied, yet shifting subject as she
hurtles through Singapores arterial network of roads and expressways in the agency
van. She is a vector within this phantasmic geography in which she moves from a village
in the Philippines to Singapore a global and cosmopolitan city.
Yet, Rosa also traverses an uncanny occult space, this strange new city where she
attempts to convince herself that there is nothing to be frightened of. What makes
Rosas journey and subsequent arrival at the Teos particularly interesting is that the Teo
household is set within a row of old shophouses, a residential setting not often represented in Singapore films.5 When she enters the house, Rosa finds a group of Chinese
men and women playing mahjong. Rosa is unable to understand much of the conversation as it takes place in Teochew. According to the subtitles, one member of the opera
troupe says If you are ever dissatisfied with your maid, you can always send her to me.
The underlying subtext suggests that Rosa, as a domestic worker, is an interchangeable
element within Singapores labour economy: her body is both capital and currency as
she becomes a sign, potentially subject to an endless series of transactions. Indeed, such

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Sophia Siddique Harvey

an exchange echoes the abuses faced by some domestic workers when they are forced
to work for multiple employers, often shared by members of the same family, or have
their freedoms curtailed, or, worse yet, are subject to physical and/or sexual abuse.
These experiences of abuse are of course not exclusive to maids who work in Singapore
but the Singaporean film text is illustrative of its ubiquity.
The Maid in particular addresses the issue of personal freedom and sexual abuse
through the material body of Rosa and the immaterial body of Esther. Mrs Teo seems to
perform all the cooking in the Teo household. Initially, at least, she seems to be a caring
and thoughtful employer. For example, she offers Rosa a place at their dinner table and
serves her a cooked egg. And when Rosa inadvertently drops her egg, Mrs Teo does not
reprimand her. Instead, she tells Rosa to dispose of the egg and offers her another to eat.
Rosas household duties include the mundane tasks of cleaning the house and doing the
laundry. However, Rosa is further required to organize, clean and care for the costumes
belonging to the opera troupe that traditionally performs during the Hungry Ghost
month. Most importantly, she serves as the primary companion for Ah Soon, the Teos
mentally handicapped son. Rosas labour is integral to the economic success and emotional wellbeing of the Teo household.
Despite being such a valuable presence within the Teo household, Rosas personal
freedoms are severely restricted. The only form of mobility afforded to her is that
connected to either Ah Soon or the Teos: she only moves through Singapores built
environment in their presence. For example, when Rosa arrives at Lucky Plaza shopping mall to send money back to her brother through a service used by domestic
workers called IREMIT, Ah Soon accompanies her. Mrs Teo even attempts to curtail
Rosas ability to communicate with her ailing younger brother in Bicol. Each time
Rosa wants to leave the shophouse to mail her letters, Mrs Teo admonishes her with
a stern warning:
Next time, you want to post letter, I post for you. You first time come to Singapore. You dont
know what kind of people are outside. They cheat you, you also dont know. You understand?
And now, its Hungry Ghost month, you must be careful.

Feeling trapped, increasingly isolated, and with a mounting sense of dread, Rosa tries to
leave the shophouse to post her own letters. As she looks at the mailbox slots, respectively labelled Singapore/Other Countries, Rosa senses a presence behind her. As she
turns gingerly around, she comes face to face with a rotting female ghost. Rosa later
discovers that this female ghost is Esther, a Filipino maid who was previously employed
by the Teos. Later in the narrative the audience discovers that Esther was raped by Ah
Soon and burned alive by Mr Teo when she tried to report the sexual crime to the
authorities.
This scene where the mailbox decentres space (Singapore/Other Countries) and
Esthers ghostly presence fragments temporal continuity (the dead, the past appearing
in the here-and-now)6 suggests a chronotope of ceaseless spectral labour flows
(Bakhtin, 1981: 84). First Esther, then Rosa, soon to be followed by thousands of other
women like them. One cannot help but read the appearance of Esther as a haunting
allegorical intervention to the infamous Flor Contemplacion case. Flor Contemplacion
arrived in Singapore in 1988 and was forced to work 18-hour days, cleaning and serving
as primary caregiver for two households. When Flor was finally allowed to take some
time off, she went to socialize with another maid and subsequently snapped, killing the
maid and her charge. Flor Contemplacion received the death penalty for her actions and
was hanged in Singapore. Her case created a sensation in Singapore and caused an

Mapping spectral tropicality, Singapore

29

uproar in the Philippines that brought relations between the two countries to their
nadir and also affected the outcome of Philippine senatorial elections and blighted the
careers of two cabinet members and two ambassadors (Asiaweek, 1995). In the phantasmic geography of The Maid, neither Singapore nor the Philippines can escape the
consequences of these spectral labour flows.
Chinese folk beliefs: spectral unions and architectural revenants
The Maid takes place during the Hungry Ghost month in Singapore. During this month,
the Gates of Hell open and ghosts enter the realm of the living. The observances of this
Chinese folk belief infiltrate the modern cityscape and skyline, and unsettle the clean,
litter-free, ordered city-spaces of Singapore with the offerings of food that spoil quickly
in the tropical climate, refuse in the form of ashes from burnt Hell money bills, wax
residue from lit joss sticks, and altars that disrupt the flow of pedestrian traffic. During
this lunar seventh month, as scenes of worship from The Maid suggest, ghosts are
released to populate the city and the mortal Singaporean-Chinese citizens are subjects
of a different disciplinary regime, not of the state but of the spectral (also see Comaroff,
2007).
What I am particularly interested in exploring are the yin and yang energies that
course through a set of architectural revenants in the film. In his book Our Supernatural
Skyline: Between Gods and Ghosts, Jonathan Lim (2005: 7491) discusses the yin and yang
energies in the Chinese supernatural belief system. According to him, a ghostly existence is a yin one (Lim, 2005: 79) and ghosts tend to appear on or along structures that
are liminal or often neglected and abandoned. This is very much the case in The Maid as
Rosa sees or senses ghosts as they appear on an overhead bridge (a liminal structure),
in a bedroom closet (a dark, neglected place) and beneath the raised performance stage
of the street opera.
Rosa eventually realizes that Ah Soon is himself filled with yin energies: he is a
ghost who has returned to his parents house during the Hungry Ghost month.
Through a series of flashbacks, the audience learns that Ah Soon was so distraught by
the murder of Esther that he committed suicide. Now his parents want to unite Ah
Soon in a spectral union with Rosa, but they must first ask her permission. The Teos
wish to perform the ghost marriage in their non-air-conditioned domicile: an anachronistic space filled with black and white photographs of Chinese opera troupe performers, ceiling fans and an altar, and devoid of modern forms of communication such
as the cell phone. In this prospective ghost marriage, there is no attempt to cement
ancestral ties or to foster stronger bonds between families. Rather, this spectral union
is more cosmopolitan in nature, seemingly able to transcend class and ethnoracial and
national boundaries. Before these transgressions are perpetrated, however, the ghost
Esther saves Rosa. While Rosa is able to finally secure her freedom, the Teos are not
as lucky and the entire family perishes: Mr Teo is consumed in a fire when his ghost
son, Ah Soon, pushes him against the lit family altar. The wrathful Esther exacts her
revenge as her gaze deepens the intensity of the blaze. Mrs Teo, on the other hand, is
hit by a vehicle as she rushes out of the shophouse, wielding a knife, in hot pursuit of
Rosa.
During the final scene of the film, Rosa emerges from the maid agency van at the
departure hall of Changi International Airport. As she enters the sliding glass doors, we
see all three members of the Teo family reflected in the glass as they stare, forlornly,
watching her departure. Rosa manages to retain her corporeal presence, her humanness, while her employers and their son lose theirs.

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Return to Pontianak: other(ed) hinterlands

Return to Pontianak was filmed on location in Desaru, on the south-west coast of Johor,
Malaysia. In an informal email exchange about the film, producer Juan Foo (pers.
e-comm., 29 September 2006) remarked that Return to Pontianak would have been shot
in Singapore if the island had possessed sufficient dense unmanaged pockets of greenery. The film opens with a title card that immediately locates the diegetic space of the
film: Pontianak: A town that lies directly across the equator on the island of Borneo.
Here, the films diegetic space is set in the Malay Archipelago. When the film ends,
another title card builds upon this geographical orientation by informing the audience:
Pontianak: A Malay woman who dies after childbirth or abuse by man and returns as
an undead controlled by a Bomoh. This doubling casts the Malay Archipelago as a
feminized and haunted terrain to be feared.
These two title cards function as coordinates in a phantasmic geography that imagines an uncanny space in which Charity Yammaguchi, an adopted Asian-American
woman, must locate her genealogical roots. Return to Pontianak, in its construction of
phantasmic geography, infuses Arjun Appadurais (1996) ethnoscapes and technoscapes
with a spectral sheen. Here, Charity, portrayed by Vietnamese-American actress Hiep
The Le, has a Japanese last name and a Malay birth mother. Her companions on this
genealogical search are Raymond Kok, a Chinese man, Luc, a British man, Uzi, a
Chinese woman, and Eye, a Malay man, who is their guide. Charity must initially
traverse cyberspace in order to coordinate the search for her lost birth mother.
Malay folk beliefs: semangat and the pontianak
Singapore, a city-state, does not possess a rural hinterland and the film Return to
Pontianak serves as its ghostly other a rural hinterland that is saturated with lush
foliage and expansive uninhabited terrain. The film inundates the viewer with images
and sounds of such overabundance: there are copious shots of leaves and fronds,
majestic trees that obscure the daylight, and the shrill trilling of insects in dense and
verdant thickets threaten to engulf Charity and her companions by cutting off their
means of communication and navigation (cell phone and GPS (global positioning
system) device).
The camera creates a palpable sense of presence with its jerky pans and tilts. The
forest or jungle (the cast of characters use these terms interchangeably) takes on an
otherworldly sense of life: something is out there. My reading of these very palpable
scenes of whispering trees, rustling leaves and undulating branches suggests the very
presence of semangat. According to Mohd Taib Osman (1989: 789):
The most ancient survival of the Old Indonesian belief system still strongly held by the Malay
villagers is the notion of semangat . . . Thus man has semangat as have all other objects, from
rocks and plants to the furniture in the house. Semangat has been translated variously as the
soul, spirit, vital force, life force, and mana. But what is basic in the principle of semangat
is that each man and each object is the house or sheath of his or its own semangat.

This thriving pulsing forest, coupled with the appearance of the pontianak, the ghost of
a woman dying at childbirth (Osman, 1989: 86), imbue the film with its spectral
tropicality. The pontianak is a precolonial horrific being who continues to haunt the
cultural imaginaries of Singapore and Malaysia (Faucher, 2004). A number of pontianak
horror films were released in colonial Singapore, but the present film is the first since
Singapores independence in 1965. The visual incarnation of the pontianak has not

Mapping spectral tropicality, Singapore

31

changed: she is still wearing white, has lustrous black hair, and is fearsome, charismatic,
enigmatic and tragic. What is particularly intriguing about this latest incarnation is the
setting and the pontianaks shifting mythology.
The pontianak is contained within this tropical space and place and never travels
beyond the confines of her dwelling (a dilapidated hut) or the jungle. This disruptive,
precolonial spectre is therefore safely ensconced in the tropical. A transgressive space,
however, does emerge with the reworking of the pontianak mythology. For example,
rather than merely becoming a vampire-ghost as a result of dying in childbirth, this
pontianak can pass the curse or ability to her estranged daughter Charity, an AsianAmerican woman who journeys to the jungles of equatorial Pontianak to search for her
mother. According to the films reworking of the mythology, this pontianak returns as
an undead controlled by a Bomoh, a traditional Malay healer who uses the occult in
his/her healing practices.
This reproductive and genealogical border crossing is contained, however, because
when Charity becomes a pontianak, she is similarly confined to the tropical forest, never
to enter or participate in urban life again. The dangers of cross-cultural contact, of
transnational travel, of a hybrid identity (Asian-American) are tamed and, once again,
displaced onto the tropical forest, a space that contemporary urban Singapore seeks to
dislocate and disavow. The pontianak as vampire-ghost and other horrific beings that
populate Southeast Asian horror films form part of precolonial belief systems that have
continued to thrive during the colonial and now postcolonial era. This makes spectral
tropicality, as a way of seeing and rethinking the tropical and the ambivalence of the
tropical urban, an interesting window into the intersections and interplays between
the spectral, postcolonial temporality/spatiality and the tropical (see Gelder, 2000 on the
intersection between horror and postcolonial studies).
Conclusion: ethnic haunting
Spectral tropicality is a form of haunting in which what has been repressed within the
air-conditioned nation of Singapore returns in the forms of both horrific beings and
uncanny spaces. It is also apparent that The Maid and Return to Pontianak suffuse their
incarnations of spectral tropicality with ethnic specificity. The Maid offers representations
of the Chinese Hungry Ghosts Festival, the ceremony of ghost marriages and yin and
yang energies. The film breaches the pragmatic and modern city-space with these
representations of Chinese folk beliefs, but this breach comes with disastrous consequences for the Teo family. Return to Pontianak examines the Malay pantheon of vampire
ghosts through the figures of the pontianak, the bomoh and the Malay folk belief of
semangat, and displaces these beliefs onto the tropical forest, which functions as a
threatening, other(ed) space and serves as Singapores tropical doppelganger. In this
other(ed) space, modern technology (cell phones and GPS) and the spectral cannot
coexist. Return to Pontianak raises rather thorny questions of the representation, visibility
and participation of ethnic Malays within Singapores urban environment and city life.
(For an engaging analysis of the intersection between culture, haunting and ethnic
identity, see Brogan, 1998.)
The Maid and Return to Pontianak therefore problematize Singapores multiracial and
multicultural belief systems, and as horror texts, call forth certain spectres inhabiting the
unsettled terrain and climate of fear beneath Singapores sociocultural landscape. These
films further reveal the ambivalence of the tropical urban that cannot be disavowed
despite the states agenda to exorcise the tropical by internalizing the temperate.

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Endnotes
1 An ambivalence with the tropical urban is perhaps best illustrated by the recent hysteria over
Singaporeans (and other individuals) who were accidentally killed by falling tree branches in
Singapore and Johor, Malaysia (Channel NewsAsia, 2007).
2 Theorist Franco Moretti (2005), for example, in Signs Taken For Wonders, offers a Marxist reading
of Dracula (as the ultimate form of capital, always in endless circulation) and Frankensteins
monster (as the worker/alienated member of the proletariat). I am indebted to an anonymous
SJTG reviewer for pointing me to this reference.
3 I thank one anonymous SJTG reviewer for suggesting a deeper look into the uncanny and
engagement with the return of the repressed.
4 I am grateful to Chua Beng Huat for this reading and his insights into the dilemmas of
representing the tropical urban in Singapore. For a postcolonial critique of the rural representations of Malays during the colonial era, see Syed Hussein Alatass (1977) The Myth of the Lazy
Natives.
5 Further discussion on representations of HDB flats in cultural productions such as poetry and
film and Singapores construction as a rhizome nation are found in Yeo (2004) and Khoo
(2006).
6 Bliss Cua Lims (2001) Spectral times: the ghost film as historical allegory provides a brilliant
discussion of the ghost and its relationship to time and history.
Filmography
The Maid. Director and writer Kelvin Tong. Dream Movie Entertainment Ltd, Media Development
Authority, Mediacorp Raintree Pictures, and Mov-Pix International Pictures, 2005.
Return to Pontianak. Director and writer Djinn (Ong Lay Jinn). Shaw Organisation and Vacant Films,
2001.
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