Reincarnating Mae Nak: The contemporary cinematic history of a Thai icon

Working from the premise that Nonzee Nimibutr’s Nang Nak (1999) marked a major turning point in the discourse surrounding Thailand’s well-known ghost Nak, this article offers a case study of more recent remakes of the narrative both as potentially revelatory of certain key meanings that now reside in the figure and as illustrative of a number of tendencies of the contemporary Thai film industry – indeed, offering a kind of longitudinal view of industrial shifts over the past fifteen years. Recent images of Nak have ranged from dangerous (and eroticized) to heroic, and the films themselves have run the gamut from low-budget exploitation, to animation, to a blockbuster comedy.