In Popular Culture
In both Malaysia and Indonesia, ghosts and the supernatural have long been the popular subject of stories in television, documentaries, film, and magazines like Mastika and Tok Ngah. The 1958 black-and-white horror movie Sumpah Orang Minyak is one of many films based on the orang minyak concept. It told of a hunchback who through supernatural means becomes handsome, but turns invisible after violating his oath. The devil offers to help achieve his worldly desires, on condition that he rapes 21 girls within 7 days.
Other Malay ghost films such as Pontianak and Revenge of Pontianak received tremendous response at their time of release. With the rise of the Islamization movement, the Malaysian government suppressed production of local films involving ghosts out of concern that they would encourage superstition. However, access to foreign horror movies made such a ban futile, and these restrictions were eventually lifted with the release of Pontianak: Harum Sundal Malam. The film was well-received, spawning a sequel and a follow-up TV series. Numerous other horror films followed suit but, in keeping with current religious trends, they usually portray all supernatural beings as evil, far removed from traditional beliefs. This is particularly so in documentaries and television series involving ghost hunters.
2007's Jangan Pandang Belakang ("Don't Look Back") holds the record as Malaysia's highest-grossing film. It centers around a malicious spirit which the hero had unknowingly brought to his fiancé's home after picking up a small jar found washed up at the beach. The 2010 Indonesian soft-porn horror movie Hantu Puncak Datang Bulan (The Menstruating Ghost of Puncak) caused considerable controversy at the time of its release. Telling the experiences of a group of young adults in a haunted house, it has much semi-nude sexuality, and has been condemned by conservative Muslim leaders.
Read more about this topic: Malay Ghost Myths
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.”
—Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)