Horror Studies - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2014

This article explores several productions from the lower-class and provincial ‘16mm era’ film form of post-war Thailand, a series of mass-produced live-dubbed films that drew heavily upon the supernatural animist belief systems that organized Thai rural village life. It will illustrate that such ghostly discourses interject liberally into the films’ diegesis and are associated particularly strongly with female characters at a time when gender roles are being renegotiated. Through textual analysis combined with historical data, the article explores the ways in which films such as Mae Nak Phra Khanong (1959) by Gomarchun, Nguu Phii (1966) by Saetthaaphakdee, Phii Saht Sen Haa (1969) by Pan Kam and Nang Prai Taa Nii (1967) by Nakarin therefore function as a means to negotiate the dramatic changes and wider context of social upheaval experienced by Thai viewers during this era, much of which was specifically connected to the post-war influx of American culture into Thailand.

Deploying Jan Assman’s notion of cultural memory, this article considers three adaptations of the Mae Nak myth in Thai cinema – Mae Nak Phra Khanong (1959) by Gomarchun, Winyan Rak Mae Nak Phra Khanong (1978) by Seney, and to a lesser extent Nang Nak (1999) by Nimibutr – as unofficial historical repositories that reflect the sociocultural and political shifts in Thailand during the last 50 years of the twentieth century. More specifically, I argue that the character of Nak, whose representation in Nimibutr’s version has been restored to the singularly superlative position she occupied in myth, is more ambiguous as a signifier in the 1959 version that reinforces the twin institutions of Buddhism and patriarchy, while subtly undermining them at the same time. This narrative equivocation, however, is altogether absent in 1978 version, in which Nak’s representation has undergone substantial devaluation possibly as a textual attempt to distance a contemporary, capitalist-driven Thailand from a past that it deems no longer usable or compatible with its ideological agenda.

Depicted as a floating woman’s head with drawn out and bloody entrails dangling beneath it, phi krasue is one of the most iconic uncanny creatures of Thai horror cinema. However, despite its position as one of Thailand’s most striking and well-known phi, there is very little research investigating this specific phenomenon. This is remarkable given the commonality of encounters with this uncanny being in ‘real life’ and the continuous presence of its ghostly images in popular cultural media. Relating empirical data gathered during anthropological fieldwork in a rural community of Thailand’s lower north-east to the analysis of two Thai ghost films that take this ghostly image as their main subject and narrative force this article argues that the knowledge of vernacular ghostlore is essential to decipher the cinematic representations’ full symbolism. Thai ghost films are produced for the ‘knowing spectator’ who has implicit knowledge of the cultural logics structuring ghostly classification in contemporary Thailand. This embodied knowledge allows Thai audiences to make sense of phi krasue’s ghostly image despite its cinematic transformation from ‘Filth Ghost’ to ‘Khmer Witch’. Based on Kristeva’s theory of abjection I will show that Thai audiences continue to see phi krasue first and foremost as uncanny ‘matter out of place’.

Mekong Hotel (2012) is an hour-long experimental film by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Set in an old hotel overlooking the Mekong, and melding documentary and fictional modes, it interweaves a ghost story, a romance, memories of the region’s troubled history and discussions on its present-day state. The film is characterized by elements of fluidity and transgression that appear in its use of the supernatural, its setting near a border river, and its oscillating modes of film style and narration, while its ghost characters transgress the border between the living and the (un-)dead. This article explores the role of haunting in Mekong Hotel, in particular its connection with the setting of the Mekong region and the memory of its history. It argues that the ghosts in the film function as carriers of the memory of the region; they also reference older forms of cinema, namely, the vernacular horror genre of the Thai classical era and thus transport media history. Through analysis of several scenes of the film, I demonstrate that these spectral figures express repressed traumas and non-official, silenced witnessing of sensitive political issues, such as conflict along the Thai-Lao border, the 2011 floods and the construction of dams along the Mekong. By reflecting on their medial origin, they lay emphasis on a vernacular discourse and a regional point of view. The analysis is supported by allusion to other short films by the director that also centre on similar topics.

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.

Horror films have played a significant role in introducing Thai cinema to international audiences and therefore inspiring Thai film-makers to produce films that could be globally marketable. Though successful with broader Thai population, Thai horror films have been repeatedly rejected by Bangkok urbanites as formulaic ‘low-class’ entertainment. The unprecedented success of Sopon Sukdapisit’s Ladda Land (2011) with Bangkok audiences reflects the recent change of direction in Thai horror to cater to the tastes of the middle classes, and invites a more thorough investigation. The article uses the example of Sukdapisit’s Ladda Land to discuss the effects of modernization and globalization processes on the development of the Thai horror genre, in particular with relation to the concept of the ghost as the figure of fear. With its reconfiguration of the typical Thai ghost story formula, Ladda Land brings horror closer to home for its middle-class audience but does so at the cost of replacing its earth-bound past-oriented revenants with the living ghosts, trapped within the temporality of a dream of social mobility and economic success.

Tiwa Moeithaisong’s 2009 production Cheuuat Gaawn Chim/The Meat Grinder is representative of a new trend in Thai horror cinema, one that has benefited from ‘the influence of short film, documentary film, and low-budget art-house movies’ together with new international marketing strategies and initiatives. This new brand of horror cinema (2000s) indicates that ‘the consumption of fear has started to gain ground commercially and aesthetically’ in Thailand. However, even though it trades on the popularity of torture-porn or spectacle horror, The Meat Grinder is aesthetically much more art-house than grind-house in what is perhaps a deliberate attempt to attract both local and global audiences. This article contends that The Meat Grinder transcends the generic conventions associated with extreme cinema in order to offer a sustained critique of the dominant narratives of Thai identity. These are based upon an internal transition from pre-modern to modern society and have been constructed through a fictional, linear history in which modernity was a natural progression and was not imposed by the colonial Other as in most other South East Asian nations. Specifically, this critique is performed through the figuration of the woman-as-monster, whose deadly recipe for noodles with the tasty addition of human flesh, has been passed down from generation to generation of women through a series of temporal displacements and spatial convergences. I therefore suggest that The Meat Grinder evokes what Lim defines as ‘immiscible temporalities’ connected to the ‘persistence of supernaturalism’, utilizing in particular the ghostly figure of the dead daughter who haunts the present-day frame. Such ‘ghostly returns’ I argue subvert conventional understandings of time as linear, both outside and inside the cinematic frame, which are contained within the discourse of crypto-colonialism on which Thai nationalism is built, and offers a politicized interrogation of class, nationality and gender politics in contemporary Thailand.

The Twilight of the Gothic, Joseph Crawford (2014) Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 368 pp., ISBN-10: 1783160640; ISBN-13: 9781783160648, h/bk, £85.00

Listen in Terror: British Horror Radio from the Advent of Broadcasting to the Digital Age, Richard J. Hand (2014) Manchester: Manchester University Press, 256 pp., ISBN: 9780719081484, h/bk, £70.00