Dr Ana Grgic1
1Monash University Malaysia, Sunway, Malaysia
Horror has a notable tradition in Southeast Asian cinemas, providing ways for filmmakers to articulate and mediate societal repressions and taboos. Notably, the horror genre incorporates narratives and tropes from Southeast Asian folktales and supernatural traditions. One of the most popular figures in Malay cinema is the pontianak, a female vampire who died as a result of childbirth or male violence, and returns to haunt patriarchy. Since the slackening of film censorship in the 2000’s, the Malay pontianak has emerged as a figure of historical turbulence, disturbing gender normativities and narratives of postcolonial national identity (Galt 2019). This paper focuses on imagined Malaysian gender identities in the digital landscapes of post-GE14 and Multimedia Super Corridor agenda through an analysis of the web-series Marilah Sayang (2019). Endeavouring to enter the SVOD and mobile video streaming, Unifi (Telekom Malaysia), commissioned youth-oriented audiovisual content. Marilah Sayang imagines a cool, urban, internet-savvy, #MeToo era version of the pontianak, negotiating between horror and comedy. While repurposing supernatural narratives from local traditions, the web series’ three protagonists Merah, Hitam and Putih, resemble the trio from the hit ABC TV series Sabrina the Teenage Witch, further stressing transnational movements and cross-cultural influences which shape Malaysian popular entertainment.
Biography
Ana Grgić is a Lecturer in Screen Studies at Monash University Malaysia. She works on film history, East European cinema, archives and memory. Her co-edited book Contemporary Balkan Cinema: Transnational Exchanges and Global Circuits a transnational and cross-cultural study of Balkan cinemas’ contemporary trends, is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.