Kuntilanak dan Horor Asia
Thursday, August 25th, 2005Kalau kita perhatikan film-film horor Asia (Korea, Jepang), mayoritas menampilkan hantu perempuan berambut panjang (berbaju putih) yang mati penasaran. Biasanya suka menakut-nakuti mangsanya sebelum kemudian membunuhnya. Ternyata hantu perempuan ini memiliki banyak kesaman dengan hantu Kuntilanak di Indonesia. Kuntilanak sendiri di era film-film Old-School Indonesia telah habis menjadi objek eksploitasi dalam beberapa film horor Indonesia. Ini tentu saja menimbulkan pertanyaan, apakah perempuan Asia yang mati penasaran kemudian menjadi hantu sejenis ini?
Terlepas dari itu, dari negeri tetangga (Malaysia & Singapura), kuntilanak yang disana dikenal dengan Pontianak, juga mendapat tempat yang lumayan baik dihati pemirsa film horor. Untuk melihat bagaimana sebenarnya fenomena ini, dapat dilihat dari kutipan dari kfccinema.com berikut ini:
Scream Queen
24 Aug 2005 [ Asian Cinema News | Posted By: magic8 ]
Source: channelnewsasia
She’s said to be rather easy to spot. Clad in a flowing dress, she has long, curved fingernails and hair streaming down her back. She is a bloodsucker, wreaking havoc on those who have wronged her, or to lament a tragedy she has suffered, usually death at childbirth. Sounds familiar? Perhaps you’re thinking of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (The Ring, 1998) or Thai horror flick Nang Nak (1999), directed by Nonzee Nimibutr, both of which feature wandering female spirits. The Maid, of course, isn’t the first scream queen to hit our screens. Almost fifty years ago, there was Maria Menado. The Rise of the Pontianak In 1957, audiences in the region were terrified by Pontianak (The Vampire), in which B. Narayan Rao cast the beautiful Indonesian actress Menado. Not only did it run for over a month in the cinemas, the movie also spawned two sequels by Rao and a fourth film by Filipino director Ramon Estela. They were all screaming successes. The first movie may have been shot a half-century ago, but the plot wasn’t tame. It centered on an ugly little girl raised in the jungle. She consumes a forbidden potion to become a beautiful woman; the recipe was taken from a book for bomohs (Malay witch doctors), which certainly wasn’t meant for little girls. Of course, the transformation came with a warning: Never touch human blood. Whoops.
In the Philippines, they call her aswang. In Malaysia, she’s the pontianak. The names may be different, but she provokes the same anxiety and terror wherever her tale is told.
Now, during the Hungry Ghost Festival, The Maid is drawing the crowds. The horror flick, produced by MediaCorp Raintree Pictures, is currently No. 1 on Singapore’s box office charts. It grossed a record-breaking $758,000 at the box office last weekend, the biggest opening weekend in Singapore for a horror movie.
Menado, who played both the beautiful Chomel and the ugly pontianak, devoured the role. I grew up listening to stories about pontianaks and plesits, supernatural insects that can get inside you and give you diseases, about disembodied heads flying in the air and getting inside your body or heart. I didn’t believe them, but I grew up hearing those stories, recalled the 63-year-old.
Still, you have to wonder, why on earth did Menado decide to make such a hideous career move? At that time, nobody here had made a horror movie like that, so I wanted to be the first. It was so tiring, hours of sitting still when they put on the make-up, she told Today. But you always have to try new things in life!
Modern-day horror has changed. The image of the pontianak dashing through the jungle has altered, as Singapore filmmaker Djinn Ong, who paid homage to the genre with Return to Pontianak (2001), pointed out. We knew the old settings and styles wouldn’t be suitable for the current generation, he said of his version. Not only do our Generation X urbanites not understand the culture and language, they won’t even bother to try to understand it. So, we decided to juxtapose the increasingly-divorced urban population of South-east Asia against the fast-changing rural landscape.
You Can’t Buy Back the Past
In Return to Pontianak, an Asian-American girl heads deep into the Borneo jungles with her friends because she is haunted by recurring dreams of her birth mother, whose last resting place is in Malaysia. Released around the same time as the infamous Blair Witch Project, Ong’s film ironically saw more comparisons to the American horror movie, with its notoriously shaky visuals, than to ghost stories, from Malaysia’s own golden age.
The Maid has also intelligently updated the horror genre by taking it out of the jungles, which can barely be found in modern Singapore, and into the heartlands and the lives of domestic workers and residents. But does that mean Singaporeans and Malaysians have forgotten about Menado’s famous turn as a pontianak?
I don’t feel forgotten at all! You’re calling me and I have had several interviews and photo shoots, she said. I left the industry in 1963 after I married my second husband, the late Sultan of Pahang, and felt I had acted enough.
However, she said she was disappointed on one count: All the prints of the pontianak films were tossed into a lombong, a mining pool, by co-owner of Cathay-Keris, Ho Ah Loke, as they were too difficult to maintain.
It’s so sad that all the prints of the original films were destroyed, she lamented. It’s a pity that your generation in Singapore can’t see them. It’s very important to keep these Malay films. You can’t buy back the past.
Despite the revival of the local horror genre with Return to Pontianak, The Maid and last year’s Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam, by Malaysian filmmaker Suhaimi Baba, it’s important to keep the legends alive.
Said cultural commentator and writer Gerrie Lim: Stars are remembered and become iconic only if people want to know more. There has to be a desire to remember the past and keep that memory alive. Why else is Elvis still around? But not everyone has forgotten Menado, not just yet. During the Screen Singapore Festival, she appeared with fellow actor Wahid Satay before the screening of their movie Sumpah Pontianak last week. They received warm applause from a packed house.
Singaporeans, it seems, will never forget the original pontianak.
