M.

cinema in Southeast Asia

Essay Three Creed & the Monstrous Feminine In Southeast Asian Horror

The monstrous feminine (Creed) in the Southeast Asian horror film takes the form of a woman who has being wronged and whose ghost returns to seek vengeance. Discuss Creeds feminist psychoanalytical theory of the monstrous feminine in the context of Southeast Asian horror films. What elements in the film signify the abject (as theorized by Kristeva and Creed)? How does the abject evoke horror and revulsion in the audience?

Southeast Asian horror is noticeably dominated by horrific female specters such as the Bporp, Nang Nak and Pontianak. The regional prominence of the avenging female ghost or spirit brings the subjectivity of Southeast Asian audiences, that these figures threaten in their abjection to the fore in filmic spectatorship. Creed suggests that like all experiences of the abject, horror films induce the ritualistic experience of confronting the boundaries of subjectivity in the service of rejecting the abject and therefore reasserting that which was threatened.1 This journey to the fringe of the symbolic order and back again is instructive in that it demarcates national, historical and social boundaries for audiences, strengthening them in the containment of the abject.2 The horror film, the perfect vehicle for abjection, challenges these boundaries as an object of abjection and through its abject transgressive agents: the vampire, ghoul or specter.3 However in the case of Southeast Asian horror cinema, it is Kristevas notion of the difference of female
Creed, B. (1986) Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: an Imaginary Abjection, Screen 27(1) p. 45. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., p.48.
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sexuality as a difference grounded in monstrousness that most commonly commands the abject position. This inherent female abjection can be unpacked along gender, ethno-historical, religious as well as psychoanalytical lines. The Nang Nak, Pontianak and Bporp disrupt these boundaries because they signal a return of the repressed and more specifically when read as the monstrous feminine, the dissolution of the security and familiarity patriarchal structures offer in religious, cultural and historical boundaries4. Williams goes so far as to suggest that the monstrous feminine is naturally the confluence of two figures who provide the most potent threats to a vulnerable male power5 in horror cinema: the woman and monster. The destruction of the monster could be interpreted as yet another way of disavowing and mastering the castration her body represents.6 This castration is rooted in an anxiety of a collapse in the binary of human and animal; this is the same abjection that monsters promise. It is the threat to the paternal border through the female potential to return to a more primitive state of being.7 In this way the female ghosts of Southeast Asia are particularly menacing, realizing both gendered and sociocultural anxieties in Southeast Asian horror. The first transgression of the monstrous feminine can be noted in the fundamental immateriality of the female specter as an abject object. As Creed suggests, the soulless body of Pontianaks and Nang Naks disrespect the symbolic religious

Ibid., p.49. Williams, L. (2002) When the woman looks, Horror: The Film Reader, Routledge, London, p. 55. 6 Ibid., p.64. 7 Grosz, E. A. Probyn, E. (1995) Sexy Bodies: the strange carnalities of feminism, Routledge, London, p.87.
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economy of Southeast Asia.8 The Pontianak and her sisters are the walking memento mori and thus are always beckoning us to take up their place.9 In the case of Nonzee Nimibutrs film Nang Nak, the ghost wifes existence beyond the confines of her corpse fractures the symbolic order in the domain of the body, highlighting the fragility of this border. Creeds observation that the religious abject is realised through horror monsters holds here.10 Naks corpse proves to be both a physical and spiritual threat. Nak is both the abject in her carnality (her arm extending unnaturally and hair falling out) but also spiritually in her challenge to the Buddhist economy of death and rebirth. Naks immaterial existence arrests the cycle of death and rebirth that is critical to the Buddhist principle of sangsara.11 This is realised filmically through the intervention of male monks as agents of masculine order and theological law. As spiritual men their piety is diametrically opposed to the primal and bestial threat Nak poses. They do not share filmic space with women and are removed from female influence. They have obtained perfect subjecthood. Their religious intervention is positioned as restoring order by containing the female threat. Nak, like all incarnations of the abject, is something from which Mak can never be free. She is something that when contained reaffirms the symbolic boundary.12 It is not simply the incorporeality of the monstrous feminine that works to create revulsion for local audiences in Southeast Asian horror, but also the relationship between the abject figure and her surroundings. Harvey notes that for citizens of Singapore, the
Creed, B. (1986) Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: an Imaginary Abjection, Screen 27(1) p. 47. 9 Ibid.,. p.48. 10 Ibid.,. p.49. 11 Sangsara, or continuous flow is the cycle of death and rebirth in Buddhist spirituality with no perceptible end except that of Nirvana or enlightenment. 12 Ibid. .p.48.
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air-conditioned nation, the uncontrolled tropics are the site of repressed history, culture and the abject female. In Kevin Tongs The Maid, the artificial construction of a city fails to mitigate this influence of the tropics and unchecked liminal spaces become occupied by Rosas ghost.13 The boundaries that are then under threat are also those of logic, civilization and progress. This spectral tropicality is as critical to an understanding of the notions of abjection as the monstrous female herself. Temperate climates imbued with progress, modernity and urbanization are valued over the tropics and recreated in the modern Singaporean state through air-conditioning.14 For the film Nang Nak, the

prevalence of animals associated with the Nang Nak invade the domestic kept space of Nak. As Fowkes posits the house comes to represent the very abject qualities associated with the maternal which must be denigrated to ensure that they remain the other.15 Both The Maid and Nang Nak present the tropical setting as uncanny, something that was repressed but now returns. As Gunning suggests with reference to technology, just beneath the surface of a smoothly functioning system lies the threat ofimpotence caused by its disruption.16 And so as Kristeva suggests, in her fluid grotesque body, the woman threatens the masculine goal of a civilized system itself.17 Creeds analysis of the abject raises another anxiety that is aggravated in the Southeast Asian female ghost, that of the construction of the maternal being as abject. She suggests that the body that can be most aligned with the theory of the abject body is
Harvey, S. S. (2008) Mapping spectral tropicality in The Maid and Return to Pontianak, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (29), p.29. 14 Ibid., p.29. 15 Fawkes, K. A. (1998) Giving up the ghost: spirits, ghosts, & angels in mainstream comedy films, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, pp.70-71. 16 Gunning, T. (1991) Heard over the phone: the Lonely Villa and the de Lorde tradition of the terrors of technology, Screen 32, p.194. 17 Grosz, E. A. Probyn, E. (1995) Sexy Bodies: the strange carnalities of feminism, Routledge, London, p.87.
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in fact that of the maternal form.18 The female body is able to be penetrated in intercourse and similarly ejects its contents in menstruation, lactation and childbirth.19 The moment of Naks transgression to specter, being the moment of childbirth and her death, indulges this anxiety as the maternal wound is left open in death and it is from this site that the spirit can be said to escape its bodily bounds. It is the biological difference of women that is horrific here,20 exposed in the singularly female experience of childbirth. In this way Naks ghost both highlights the fragility of the law of bodily containment,21 and is also horrific as a failure of a woman to fulfill her maternal function in a patriarchal society of being mother, woman, and reproductive agent.22 Kristeva and Creeds exploration of abjection provides a useful scaffold for evaluating the continued appearance of female and maternal specters in Southeast Asian horror cinema. Incarnations of the Bporp, Nang Nak and Pontianak induce both a visceral and psychological anxiety in audiences as they package abjection from multiple discourses working within Southeast Asia. The simultaneous threat to established religious, cultural and social boundaries is largely compounded by that of the monstrous feminine, which exposes the gendered structures that support them. If, as Creed argues, abject things are those which highlight the fragility of the law23 then the maternal body as the very antithesis of male law and order offers a rich plot to map these other taboos.
Creed, B. (1993) Dark Desires: Male Masochism in the Horror Film in Cohan, S. & Rae Hark, I. Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities, Routledge, London, p.122. 19 Creed, B. (2005) Phallic Panic: Film, Horror, & the Primal Uncanny, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, p.15. 20 Ibid., p.16. 21 Creed, B. (1986) Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: an Imaginary Abjection, Screen 27(1) p. 48. 22 Creed, B. (2005) Phallic Panic: Film, Horror, & the Primal Uncanny, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, p.2. 23 Creed, B. (1986) Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: an Imaginary Abjection, Screen 27(1) p. 48.
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The process of horrifying audience can thus be said to be an instructive one as familiar boundaries are tested, checked and solidified. Southeast Asian horror cinema shares the projective inversion of other horror cinema that inverts the relationship between predators and victims in society, militarizing those that are suppressed in filmic space. Once the societal victim becomes predator and is defeated their original relationship outside the film is reaffirmed. However in the case of Southeast Asian horror cinema, the recurrence of the suppressed in the form of a maternal specter suggests much more about the patriarchal suppression of women and mothers than it does about any innate female monstrousness.

Reference List
Creed, B. (1993) Dark Desires: Male Masochism in the Horror Film in Cohan, S. & Rae Hark, I. Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities, Routledge, London Creed, B. (1986) Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: an Imaginary Abjection, Screen 27(1): 44-71 Creed, B. (2005) Phallic Panic: Film, Horror, & the Primal Uncanny, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne Fowkes, K. A. (1998) Giving up the ghost: spirits, ghosts, & angels in mainstream comedy films, Wayne State University Press, Detroit Grosz, E. A. Probyn, E. (1995) Sexy Bodies: the strange carnalities of feminism, Routledge, London Gunning, T. (1991) Heard over the phone: the Lonely Villa and the de Lorde tradition of the terrors of technology, Screen 32(2): 184-196 Harvey, S. S. (2008) Mapping spectral tropicality in The Maid and Return to Pontianak, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (29): 24-33 Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of horror: An essay on abjection, Columbia University Press, New York Williams, L. (2002) When the woman looks, Horror: The Film Reader, Routledge, London

Bibliography
Freeland, C. A. (1996) Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noel Carroll, University of Wisconsin Lindsey, S. S. (1991) Horror, Femininity, & Carries Monstrous Puberty, Journal of Film & Video, (43): 33-44 Yusoff, N. (2005) Between Pontianak & Psycho Slasher: Reading the Paradox of Horror in Contemporary Malaysia, Jurnal Skrin Malaysia W.C: 1276