Pontianaks, Ghosts and the Possessed: Female Monstrosity and National Anxiety in Singapore Cinema KENNETH PAUL TAN* National University of Singapore Abstract: In its self-conscious transformation into a global city with a national culture that strains to include post-industrial values, contemporary Singapore has had to struggle with the repressed anxieties that threaten to return and disrupt its entry into the advanced stages of global capitalism. This article argues that such struggles are ritually performed in a selection of contemporary Singapore films that feature female monstrosity. By adopting the psychoanalytic theory of the monstrous-feminine developed by Barbara Creed (1993), this article analyses the pontianak of Malay folklore in Return to Pontianak (2001), the vengeful ghost of a murdered Filipina domestic worker in The Maid (2005), and the beautiful female psychologist possessed by the spirit of a tiger in Tiger’s Whip (1998). The three Singapore films are modern rituals that serve to bring Singapore’s national anxieties under control by subjecting female monstrosity – their grotesque embodiment – to patriarchal discipline. Keywords: Singapore cinema, monstrous-feminine, castration anxiety, national anxiety, patriarchal society National Anxieties, Singapore Cinema and Horror Films Singapore’s national psyche is a conflicted one: marked on the one hand by pride in the country’s accelerated progress ‘‘from third world to first’’ (the title, in fact, of Singapore’s first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs in 2000), and on the other hand by nervous sensitivity to the fragility of its achievements in conditions of permanent vulnerability. This tension between national pride and apprehension is heightened by an acute awareness of Malaysia and Indonesia as volatile neighbours; fault lines in a multiethnic, multi-religious, and increasingly class-conscious society; externally induced economic crises; the impact of global pandemics and natural as *Correspondence Address: Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, 469C Bukit Timah Road, Singapore 259772. Email: spptank@nus.edu.sg Asian Studies Review June 2010, Vol. 34, pp. 151–170 ISSN 1035-7823 print/ISSN 1467-8403 online/10/020151-20 Ó 2010 Asian Studies Association of Australia DOI: 10.1080/10357821003802037 Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010