Southeast Asian cinema is having a moment. Though hardly overrepresented in Western media, films from the region have recently been gaining recognition—and with it, momentum—on the international scene. The emergence of globally acclaimed auteurs like Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Lav Diaz in the new millennium has certainly been a big part of the process, but recent years have especially been marked by a wave of irreverently stylish, postmodern and subversive takes on genre cinema by young women filmmakers: the Indonesian Mouly Surya’s revenge western Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (2018) was an early trailblazer, while last year’s Filipino B-action pastiche Leonor Will Never Die by Martika Ramirez Escobar also made a splash.
The latest work in that vein comes from Malaysia, in the shape of Amanda Nell Eu’s debut feature Tiger Stripes, a prize-winner at Cannes last year that generated buzz on the festival circuit and has gone on to secure international releases in many countries. Tiger Stripes is a horror comedy, a tale of teenage girls in small-town Malaysia, one of whom, Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal), suddenly begins to experience mysterious bodily transformations. Puberty, yes, but also something altogether more unexpected, as her body begins to turn into that of a kind of were-tiger. Bit by bit, she grows claws, whiskers and a tail, and throws the lives of both her family and her school community into turmoil.
Tiger Stripes plays the horror narrative of shape-shifting and monstrous transformations as a metaphor for societal anxieties: from the perspective of the girls, the taboo and stigmatisation around menstruation; from that of the adults and authority figures, the fear of the uncontrolled and strongheaded independence of adolescent girlhood. The societal straitjacket on the girls’ behaviour, especially on the free-spirited Zaffan, is represented by a series of increasingly absurd school assemblies where students are shamed or praised, rules reiterated and the veneer of respectability held on to at all costs. These scenes are shot with a deliciously deadpan humour, underlining their sham sense of order against the background of chaos wrought by Zaffan’s escalating transgressions.
Elsewhere, classroom scenes—where sample sentences like “father goes to work” are used to teach much more than just grammar rules—underline the film’s concern with gender roles. There are elements here, especially in the focus on religious norms and rebellious youth, that could easily lean towards the age-old and frankly tired trope of “tradition vs. modernity,” but thankfully, the film steers clear of that clichéd juxtaposition. Instead, Eu sketches a believably contemporary world where the two mix in sometimes peculiar ways and neither is a straightforward stand-in for good or evil.
In a memorably vibrant opening, the girls goof around on TikTok, while later on they read up on urban myths about girls-turned-into-jungle-monsters on online forums; these are lives shaped by the smartphone as young lives everywhere are. Crucially, however, the forces of conservative patriarchy are shown to be similarly conversant with the latest technologies, as best exemplified by the outrageous exorcist-cum-influencer (Shaheizy Sam) called to the scene to deal with the situation, travelling around with his own film crew and never missing a chance to promote his YouTube channel and Facebook page. Technology is presented here as merely an outlet and a medium for the often-contradictory impulses of humanity.
In playing the transformations of puberty as monstrous body horror, Tiger Stripes obviously taps into a longstanding cinematic tradition, from the blood-soaked climax of Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976) all the way to Julia Ducornau’s recent Cannes winner Titane (2021) with its macabre and transhumanist reimagination of sexuality and gender. Like Tiger Stripes, these films also deal with the limits imposed on women and womanhood by society, employing the grotesque as an aesthetic counterstrategy to disrupt such rigid structures.
That the theme has increasingly been picked up by female filmmakers, in the traditionally male-coded field of horror cinema, has certainly added to its political edge. Few arthouse hits in recent years have shocked audiences quite like the relentless Titane; and while the general tenor of Tiger Stripes is far lighter and more playful, Eu nevertheless had to take to Instagram to decry cuts made to the film by Malaysia’s censorship board for its domestic release.[1]Evidently, female agency that revels in its monstrosity remains a disruptive prospect around the world.
Beyond Western cinema, the central metaphor of Tiger Stripes also ties it to a different cinematic tradition of human-to-animal metamorphoses. In Southeast Asian cinema, the manifestation of repressed sexuality in the form of the tiger, is most familiar from Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004), but there is also an older tradition, and one that is local to Malaysia itself: the highly popular and iconic pontianak horror films of the golden age of Malay cinema in the 1950s and 1960s, of which several were made, in competing series by different studios, drawing on motifs from Malay folklore.[2]
It is evident that Eu feels at home with those stories, as her previous short films have dealt with reinterpretations of the pontianak and the penanggalan, yet another female monster of Malay myth. And it is interesting to hear Eu’s rationale for telling stories about these creatures, whom she describes as outsiders whose power comes from not fitting in, and how that reverberates with her own experiences between cultures as a Malaysian student in the West and as a returnee in her home country.[3] The monster thus becomes an embodiment of a triumphant dual “other,” from the perspective of both gender and of culture.
The pontianak, a kind of female vampire that is born when a woman dies in childbirth, is not generally described as tiger-like, although there are variations on the theme. Of the older films, Tiger Stripes most closely brings to mind 1964’s Singapore production Pontianak Gua Musang (sometimes called The Vampire of the Cave in English), directed by B.N. Rao, where a village is gripped by rumours of a murderous pontianak prowling the nearby jungle, while others insist that the threatening presence is “merely” a tiger. Like many horrors, the film plays on this ambiguity between natural and supernatural and the tiger emerges as a kind of liminal creature that prowls the boundary between the two.[4] Moreover, as Rosalind Galt notes, said ambiguity was also leveraged to make the film more palatable to audiences at a time when supernatural beliefs began to be increasingly frowned upon.[5]
Tiger Stripes and Pontianak Gua Musang are radically different in shape and tone, reflecting their different eras and politics, but the basic elements are the same. There is a small community gripped by rumours, whether whispered in public squares or exchanged on phone screens; and the jungle as a transgressive space where the conventions of everyday society cease to function, emphasised in Eu’s film by a hauntingly minimalist soundtrack that foregrounds and overemphasises the ever-present animal and insect sounds of the woods all around.
Both films also centre the uneasy relationship between society and gender in ways that broadly parallel each other, even if with a distance in time of almost sixty years in between. The suspected monster in Pontianak Gua Musang is the vengeful spirit of a woman who dies after being pushed away from society for sexual impropriety, just as Zaffan is thrown out of her friendship group and bullied for her refusal to conform. These are female monsters, monstrous women that evoke the primal forces of myth to stand against rational, patriarchal society. That basic story, however, can be—and has been—told from a number of different viewpoints.
By now, all this talk of were-tigers has perhaps already called to mind another classic of feline horror cinema, this one from the more globally familiar cultural terrain of Hollywood: Cat People (1942). These days the film is perhaps primarily remembered as a showcase of director Jacques Tourneur’s richly tenebrous style—or, indeed, as the inspiration for the 1982 remake with its infectiously catchy David Bowie theme song—but it remains a canonical work of classic horror. And the original Cat People also touches upon the very same issues—the triad of gender, myth and society—as Tiger Stripes and Pontianak Gua Musang.
In Cat People, the transforming panther-women are of Serbian descent, and their mysterious abilities derive from a historical legacy of witchcraft said to stretch back to the Ottoman conquest of that region. As in Tiger Stripes, the threat is embedded in religious otherness (defined against normative Christianity and Islam, respectively), although neither film is really interested in religion for itself, but as a foundational myth of patriarchal, conservative social order. Both Zaffan and Irena Dubrovna are monstrous because in confronting their gender and sexuality they find pathways to other, competing myths that undermine that order.
Tourneur’s Cat People is sympathetic to Irena’s viewpoint, and certainly exploits the sexual connotations of her powers for titillation—she is unable to consummate her marriage out of fear of losing control—but throughout she is presented as a tragic figure, unable to find fulfilment in her role as a conventional wife and a mother. Here she bears some similarities to Pontianak Gua Musang’s haunting presence Rohani, whose tragic downfall is similarly entwined with sexual transgression, in this case a premarital sexual encounter with her fiancé.
Another strikingly similar take on this trope, transposed to an altogether different geography, can be found in the Finnish 1952 film The White Reindeer (Valkoinen peura), the name referring to the murderous animal that the protagonist Pirita turns into as a consequence of a love spell gone wrong. Like Irena, Pirita is a tragic figure whose inability to fit into her role as an obedient wife must be redeemed by death at the film’s climax, in this case at the hands of her husband, ignorant of what he is doing.
The White Reindeer shares much of its thematic content with Cat People, which presumably acted as an inspiration, but emphasises the cultural aspect of the mythical encounter, which is treated only very cursorily in the latter’s “Serbian” backstory. Pirita is Sámi, representing the indigenous people of the north of Finland, and her monstrous aspect is brought about by the shamanic magic of her people; this world of the supernatural is cast against the character of a Finnish forester from the south who initially treats the stories of witchcraft as superstitious nonsense.
The White Reindeer, also a prize-winner at Cannes, has often been seen as a landmark of Finnish cinema and an artistic high point praised for its cinematography. Recent years have, however, seen a critical reassessment that has focused on the film’s superficial and disrespectful treatment of Sámi culture.[6] Made by a Finnish director and with a primary cast composed of Finnish actors, its depiction of Sámi lands as a country of primal magic and exoticised local customs reinforced longstanding, harmful stereotypes and deprived the Sámi community of a voice to define themselves within the mainstream culture of Finland.
Whatever its artistic merits, as a cultural product, The White Reindeer represents an undeniably colonial and Orientalising positionality—as does Cat People, even if in a less in-your-face manner. Made by male directors, they indelibly associate the cultural, Orientalised other with the female other as external subversions of societal order that male figures—the forester with his rifle; the psychiatrist with his books—seek to redress. They betray a fascination with their respective monsters, while keeping them at a safe distance, relegated to the sphere of the pre-modern and the anti-Western.
Considering the similarities, Cat People likely acted as an inspiration to the makers of The White Reindeer; but it is tempting to wonder if it, in turn, was perhaps inspired by Malay myths—after all, panthers are in reality hardly associated with the Balkans, while they are very much a part of the local fauna on the Malay peninsula (and, of course, closely related to the tiger). In fact, a major immediate influence was Ambrose Bierce’s 1897 story “The Eyes of the Panther,” which provides the name for Irena (and the ending for The White Reindeer), a tale set in yet another colonial milieu, that of the settler frontier of the American West. But, of course, that does not exclude the possibility of a more indirect Southeast Asian connection.
Certainly, Malay monsters have haunted the Western imagination for a long time. Rosalind Galt has even suggested that a passage on various creatures of the night, as described by the travel writer Isabella Bird in her book on Southeast Asia, The Golden Chersonese (1883), was a major influence behind Bram Stoker’s conception of the eponymous monster in the genre-defining Dracula. That novel was published in 1897, and is therefore a contemporary of Bierce’s story, a coincidence that may or may not be meaningful.[7]
While Malay myths were hardly the only influence behind Stoker’s Dracula, it nevertheless feels more than a little telling that the powerful female figure of the vampiric pontianak, as interpreted by a famed female author, somehow turned male in the male retelling that brought vampires to the Western mainstream. Yet Bird herself was but one link in the complicated chain of transfers that bridged Malay and Western fantasies, a process that took place—inevitably—under the heavy shadow of nineteenth-century colonialism.
On a simple level, to emphasise the “superstitious” character of the people—as if these very same myths had not fascinated generation after generation of Western “scholars” in often lascivious retellings—was to assign them a spot on a lower rung of the hierarchy that empire depended on. And more insidiously, Maxwell also presented the prevalence of such myths and beliefs as evidence for understanding “the Muhammadanism of the Malay as an accident not to be taken into account in studying the character and tracing the origin of the people.”[8] This served to isolate, at least on the level of discourse, the Malay population under British rule from the global networks of Islam that challenged the imperial machine as a source of authority.
While Bird named Maxwell as her unquestioned and unproblematically reliable source, the latter effectively camouflaged the– presumably Malay—informants he relied upon under the impersonal veneer of his own “expertise.” There is, however, an earlier occasion of knowledge transfer where all parties can be named, which throws light on the intricacies of colonial demonology. This is recorded in the Malay manuscript known as the Hikayat Abdullah, a biographical work written by the Melaka-born scribe and teacher Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir. Abdullah, who worked closely with the missionary William Milne, describes how one day an incidental misunderstanding between the latter’s wife and a Chinese servant brought up the topic of Malay folklore:
When Mr. Milne heard this he was greatly surprised and said “You know all about these beliefs?” I replied “Sir, all these things if I were to explain them would take up a large book. But its contents would be futile and altogether useless. Intelligent men do not wish to hear of such things, thinking them ridiculous.” Then he said “Very well. Tell me only about the birth-spirits. I would like to hear about them. I will write your account in English so that white men shall know how misguided are those that put their faith in them.”[9]
Milne did indeed write that account, published later in the Anglo-Indian Gleaner, a magazine of the missionary press in Melaka, accompanied by a rough but striking drawing of the penanggalan apparently by Abdullah’s hand. Unsurprisingly, Abdullah is again not named in the (anonymous) text, and his role in the story would have remained unknown were it not for his biography, where the conversation is treated as a trivial anecdote.
The exchange does, however, underline some key facets concerning the recycling of myths in colonial contexts. It is striking that this occasion of a—learned, eloquent—Malay intellectual teaching Europeans about a facet of his culture that he himself deems frivolous and of little import, is once again transformed in translation into a morality narrative of the misguidedness of the ways of its speaker.
It is also notable how, in the above quote, Milne immediately zeroes in on the “birth-spirits,” tales of the vampiric spirits of women, like the pontianak, who died in childbirth. It appears that, like so many after him, he recognised the potential attraction of such a female figure cast at the intersection of bodily horror and sexuality and, by (weakly) disguising it as a cautionary, repulsive tale, sought to harness that curiosity to the benefit of both his journal and his church.
Milne was, of course, far from the first or the last to play the duplicitous game of, on the one hand, reproaching and ridiculing such tales of the supernatural, while on the other blatantly seeking to take advantage of their popularity. The duality is baked into the essence of horror as a genre, and as such is evidenced by the long line of “anthropological” studies, folk tale collections and straight-up fictions that have since been produced to satisfy the curiosity of Western audiences for exotic fantasies, drawing on myths from Southeast Asia and indeed from around the world.
It is also that very same curiosity—the simultaneous feeling of both superiority and inferiority embedded in the mainstream, “rational” position—that Eu’s Tiger Stripes has met with in the twenty-first century, and to great success. Compared to some of its less reflective predecessors, the film skillfully subverts the initial premise, spinning it around to ask the viewer: do you see yourself in the monster? Would you yourself not want to be transformed?
Between were-tigers, -panthers and even -reindeer, the metamorphosing, animalistic female figure has a long and winding history behind it. It is a complicated story that can only really be made sense of from an intersectional perspective, recognising the need of patriarchal societies to cast their disruptors in the twin categories of “other,” cultural and sexual. Yet crucially, the very attraction of these stories, their wide appeal among viewers, readers and listeners across times and places, also inevitably opens up space for ambiguous sympathies and counternarratives.
Amanda Nell Eu’s Tiger Stripes is a fitting culmination—for now—of that long line of metamorphoses: a work of defiantly forward-looking Southeast Asian cinema that reinterprets old myths for both local and global audiences, challenging social conservatism and cultural imperialism both at home and abroad, in a language that is both specific and universal.
[1]https://www.instagram.com/p/CymXcAOyz1C/
[2]A lot has been written about the pontianak genre: for a thorough account, see Rosalind Galt’s Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization (Columbia University Press, 2021). For more on the golden age of Malay cinema, see Nor Afidah Bte Abd Rahman and Michelle Hen, “The Golden Age of Malay Cinema: 1947–1972,” BiblioAsia 11:1 (2015) [https://biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg/vol-11/issue-1/apr-jun-2015/ga-malay-cinema/].
[3] Interview by Ng Su Ann in NME (17 May 2023): https://www.nme.com/en_asia/features/film-interviews/tiger-stripes-cannes-director-interview-amanda-nell-eu-3444553
[4] The tiger is, of course, an ever-present symbol in Southeast Asian speculative fiction. Beyond the films discussed here, one might also mention Indonesian author Eka Kurniawan’s novel Man Tiger or, indeed, the classic Strange Horizons story that shares its title with Amanda Nell Eu’s film, by the Vietnamese American author Nghi Vo.
[5] Galt, Alluring Monsters, 73–74.
[6] Noora Kalliomäki and Niina Siivikko, “Anteeksipyyntöjä ja uudelleenkehystämistä: 2010-luvun keskustelu audiovisua alisen kulttuurin sa amelaisrepresenta atiosta Suomessa” [“Apologies and reframing: discussion in the 2010s around the representation of the Sámi in Finnish audiovisual culture”], Lähikuva 2 (2020), 45-48.
[7]Rosalind Galt, Alluring Monsters, 6-8.
[8] W.E. Maxwell, “The Folklore of the Malays,” Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 7 (1881), 29.
[9]“””The Hikayat Abdullah (transl. by A.H. Hill),” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 28:3 (1955), 106.