Faridah Ibrahim (FF230)

20018660990

Film Theory and Appreciation / FDC 421

October 2018

Themes and Tropes of Transgression in Two Malaysian Horror Films:

Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam and Susuk

This essay focuses on the close analysis of selected scenes from two Malaysian horror films

Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam (Shuhaimi Baba, 2004) and Susuk (Amir Muhammad/

Naiem Ghalili, 2008), both of which prominently feature women as evil spirits or agents

and victims. I argue that diverse cinematic elements, ranging from mise-en-scène to

editing, work together to articulate themes and tropes of ‘transgression’ that are often

associated with the horror genre. In particular, I attempt to indicate the ways in which

narrative and audio-visual strategies of these films complicate viewers’ perspectives,

precluding them from identifying completely with the characters whose gender identities

are rendered more ambivalent than in the traditional Malaysian horror genre. Pontianak

reprises the iconic role of the pontianak, or the undead spirit of a woman who has been

raped and dies during childbirth (Ng, 2009). The female protagonist here is depicted as

more complex, oscillating between being an object of sympathy as a victim and one of fear

and disgust as a monster. Like Pontianak, Susuk also plays with and subverts the binary of

woman as victim or aggressor in its narrative of the downfall of a young woman who,

pursuing her ambition as a singer-performer, experiments with susuk, a taboo form of the

black arts in which mystical charm needles are implanted into the skin.

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 The first scene to be analysed is the final sequence of Pontianak Harum Sundal

Malam, which demonstrates the pontianak’s ability to summon her virulent semangat – to

transgress nature’s laws with impunity. The sequence begins with Marsani expressing his

sense of atonement when he brings out Meriam’s prima donna’s tiara and puts it on his

head. By embellishing himself with Meriam’s stage accessory and cosmetics such as

eyeliner and lipstick, Marsani ‘feminises’ himself, further toning down the insensitive

machismo that has led to his string of misdeeds. The scene shows him consumed by

remorse and sobbing when he recalls the suffering that he caused Meriam. At this stage,

the flashback actually reveals to the viewer that Marsani was not directly involved in the

stabbing and murder of Meriam: he initially wanted to rape her but did not. The present

scene and the flashback serve as a form of contemplation of one time through another. It

can be read as nostalgia infused with the pain of remembering what is gone and unable to

be recovered. Due to the spectral haunting from the past, this nostalgia constitutes “the

desire to return to a lost time to rectify mistakes” (Lim, 2009, p. 159). This attempt to

reclaim the past while knowing that it cannot be retrieved, echoes Marsani’s unwavering

longing for Meriam. From the beginning, Pontianak portrays Marsani’s obsessive fixation

on her: he ubiquitously smells Meriam’s cloth and scarf. In the present, Marsani’s fetishism

remains evident when Marsani still keeps some of her belongings, a nostalgic disposition

that represents a desire that cannot be realised.

Then, viewers are confronted with the invasion of Marsani’s house by the pontianak

that symbolically represents notions of border crossing and disruption, not only temporally

but also spatially. The pontianak generates an explosion which shatters some of the

windows of Marsani’s house, sending shards of glass hurtling through the air. She leaps

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onto members of Marsani’s family who recoil in panic and rush out into the backyard. This

is followed by a lightning strike and a crash of thunder: the lightning destroys a garden

trellis and long narrow pieces of flying wood hit Marsani, severely injuring his head. The

pontianak grabs hold of Anna and strangles her as both levitate into midair. By now, the

pontianak’s endurance and indestructibility are generating awe and terror in the viewer.

Here, the pontianak evokes feelings of disgust and threat due to its being essentially impure

and to its fusion of hitherto disjointed entities into one spatially and temporally unified

character.

Due to the deployment of camera perspectives between objective (long shot) and

subjective (close-up) shots, frenetic movement, and dissonant sounds, this explosive CGI-

enhanced action sequence encourages a more fluid gendered identification with the

pontianak. On the one hand, the use of an editing device called ‘shock cut’ onto the

pontianak’s gruesome, hideous face, along with close-ups of her freakish red eyes

accompanied by shrill growls, further reinforces a shocking and visceral effect and engages

the viewer in extreme psychic proximity with the ghost. On the other, the use of long shots

and extreme long shots to capture all characters, both aggressor and victims, functions

objectively as their points-of-view belong to no specific character. In this respect, the

subjective becomes the objective provisionally and in the process the vision of one

perspective is reflected in the other (Rizzo, 2012).

At the same time, Meriam demands Marsani to return all of her belongings. There

is a moment when viewers see the appearance of dead characters Laila, Sitam and Danial

witnessing Marsani’s confession, an image that gives rise to the scene’s growing sense of

un-canniness, instantiating a paradoxical conjuncture between reality and fantasy. In

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addition, the homogeneous space and time of this visual is fractured by the intimation of

multiple worlds intersecting within this scene. The sequence’s final moment amplifies the

trope of haunting when the ghost of the pontianak is abruptly transformed into its real-life

doppelgänger Maria. Viewers see Marsani – after admitting his wrongdoing – attempting

to strangle Maria, not Meriam who has disappeared.

The positioning of Marsani as a villain is further complicated in a brief, surrealistic

scene towards the end that not only culminates in his feminisation but also appears

ambiguous. It depicts him and Meriam clad in traditional performance costumes, dancing

a gamelan together, a gesture that stands in contrast with his egocentric machismo. Critic

A. Wahab Hamzah (2004) has questioned whether this brief scene attempts to signal

something specific about their relationship, which the film does not unfold. Andrew Ng

(2009) reads it as a signal of ‘healing’ enabled by traditional Malay dance to:

provide a gateway through which a wrong spirit can return and demand reparation.
Yet interestingly, this is fundamentally in keeping with the function of traditional
Malay dances as a method of communicating with spirits and as a cure. It is finally
through dance that healing comes to Marsani and the restless Mariam. In the final
scene of the film, Marsani, dressed in traditional dance gear (and wearing the stolen
tiara), confronts Maria, whom he believes to be the pontianak.
(p. 180)

I extend the abovementioned reading of healing to a form of romantic reconciliation

possible only in an otherworldly or utopic time, a tendency that complicates Marsani’s

position as a villain. Such ambivalent representations of gender in relation to morality and

time are also at the thematic centre of Susuk, the other film to which I now turn.

In Susuk, tropes of ‘transgression’ not only inform the film’s themes and narrative

structure, but also evoke highly affective states of horror, fear and anxiety. The scene that

I choose is the first murder scene, which features Marcella, the winner of a talent show,

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taking a shower. The beginning of the scene generates a sense of dread and unease when

the viewers share the voyeuristic point-of-view of the killer. The camera slowly tracks the

living room of Marcella’s apartment as a jazzy pop song plays in her apartment’s interior

space. It then slowly zooms into the shower box and pauses, allowing the viewers to see

the silhouette of Marcella taking a shower. The shot cuts to a medium close-up shot of

Marcella lathering soap on her neck and shoulders as she becomes aware that the music

has suddenly stopped. Wrapping herself in a bathrobe, she steps out of the shower and

wanders into the living room to discover that the disc tray of her player is open.

Soon after, she sees a chicken feather floating down from the top of her TV shelf.

A shot/reverse shot pattern shows her confused reaction, generating suspense which

intensifies when, out of nowhere, a chicken plops onto the top of the shelf, followed by

more chickens plopping onto a table, their movement accompanied by a great flurry of

descending feathers. A black-clad figure suddenly appears and grabs Marcella’s neck,

raising her up in the air and strangling her. The figure plunges a knife into Marcella’s body

and slashes her several times. Blood splatters onto the wall and against the window. Then,

the killer brutally hurls her against the wall, drags her mutilated body along the floor, lifts

her up again and starts to pull out her intestines. A great quantity of blood seeps from

Marcella’s dead body as it lies on the floor.

During the assault, the stylistic emphasis shifts when the film speeds up the scene’s

tempo through rapid cutting: shots of Marcella being slashed are juxtaposed with shots of

chickens briefly flapping their wings. This juxtaposition connects the gruesome attack with

the sinister presence of the chickens. At this stage, due to the frenetic movement,

claustrophobic framing and multiple camera angles, the viewers’ perspectives penetrate

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seamlessly against the victim’s reaction and the camera’s point-of-view (which reflects

that of the killer), blurring their perspectives. At this point, all of the shots are objective as

their point-of-view belongs to no specific character. This stylistic strategy helps the viewer

to experience the killer’s ruthlessness and aggression in the face of the victim’s

helplessness, further cutting through the barriers of space and time.

In addition, the dissonant sounds of the chickens flapping and clucking, the victim’s

screaming and the haunting soundtrack, all serve to create sensations of tension, alarm and

anxiety, further disorienting the viewers’ perceptions while at the same time undermining

the more ‘objective’ representational quality of the image based on the documentary-style

camera movements. The explosive action produces a visceral form of transgression in the

viewer. This parallels the themes and leitmotifs of transgression that constitute the scene.

The props and setting in the scene appear as significant aspects of mise-en-scène.

For example, the modern space of the victim’s apartment is invaded by chickens, which

are associated with the pastoral kampong. The appearance of the chickens in the scene (as

well as in other grisly murder scenes) is significant on several levels. As co-director Amir

Muhammad observed in an interview, their appearance signifies the practice of black arts

(Fadli Al-Akiti, 2008). In the scene just described, their appearance, while contributing to

sense of foreboding and unease, constitutes a form of spatial transgression when they

appear out of nowhere, particularly in the urban interior spaces of an apartment. The

chickens are linked to the film’s depiction of the idyllic kampong setting, representing

Suzana’s/Soraya’s innocent, halcyon days. In the scene where she is having dinner with

Dukun Dewangga, he asks her: ‘Some meat does taste best rare. Chicken?’ Suzana replies:

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‘I don’t like chicken. I feel like throwing up’, signaling her refusal to be associated with

her past and the traditional, rural womanhood embodied by her mother.

Symptomatically, the character Marcella embodies the notion of moral and cultural

transgression, arising from her involvement in the entertainment industry as a female pop

idol, her class snobbery and filial impiety. Finally, the shower itself signifies a form of

cultural transgression as the scene clearly alludes to the famous scene in Hitchcock’s

Psycho, functioning as a cultural signifier for Western modernity. As a female pop idol,

Marcella can be read along her counterpart, the protagonist Soraya who quits her job as a

nurse to become a singer, a tendency that can be seen as transgressing the socially-

sanctioned paradigm of Malay-Muslim femininity. For example, when she confides in her

conservative mother about her aspirations, her mother insists that she should continue her

nursing career for its security and the pension she will receive. When her initial attempts

to become a singer fail, she remains adamant about experimenting with susuk, showing

little concern for its deadly repercussions. Both susuk and singing/performing are

transgressive sites or arenas through which the repressed body may unleash expressions of

anger, desire and power.

As I have demonstrated in my analysis, both films’ stylistic approaches help portray

more complex representations of gender generated by the characters’ multiple forms of

transgressions; for example, the combination of diverse camera angles, rapid editing and

dissonant sound contributes not only to the viewers’ flexible perspectives, but also to their

affective and emotional states. The aforementioned cinematic elements interact with each

other in contributing to both films’ overall form that highlights the conventions and

emotions of horror, as well as thematic issues of gender and culture. The notions of

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transgression that permeate both Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam and Susuk provide

popular genre cinema not only with alternative ways of imagining and thinking about the

feminine in Malaysia, but also with some insight into the darker side of our contemporary

lives.

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 References

A. Wahab Hamzah. (2004, June 1). Kejayaan – Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam.

Utusan Malaysia.

http://www.utusan.com.my/utusan/info.asp?y=2004&dt=0601&pub=utusan_mala

ysia.

Amir Muhammad & Naiem Ghalili (Directors and Writers). (2008). Susuk

[Motion Picture]. Malaysia: Grand Brilliance Sdn. Bhd.

Fadli Al-Akiti. (2008, August 1). Interview with Amir Muhammad: Tawakal-Allah Amir

buat Susuk. Tontonfilem Blog.

http://tontonfilem.blogspot.com.au/2008/08/tawakal-allah-amir-buat-susuk.html.

Lim, B. C. (2009). Translating time: Cinema, the fantastic and temporal critique.

Duke University Press.

Ng, A. (2009). A cultural history of the pontianak films. In A. Muhammad (Ed.),

New Malaysian essay 2 (pp. 213-243). Matahari Books.

Ng, A. (2009). Death and the maiden: The pontianak as excess in Malay popular culture.

In J. E. Browning & C. J. K. Picart (Eds.), Draculas, vampires, and other undead

forms (pp.167-186). Scarecrow Press.

Rizzo, T. (2012). Deleuze and film: A feminist introduction. Continuum.

Shuhaimi Baba. (Director and Writer). (2004). Pontianak harum sundal malam

[Motion Picture]. Malaysia: Pesona Pictures Sdn. Bhd.