Ghosts and Gore

By Tian Lin

Mistreatment suffered by women when they are alive is a shared feature of the stories in many Thai horror movies. The female characters often endure a miserable death after being exploited or tortured by men, evoking both fear and sympathy for the women ghosts. Revenge by supernatural entities in the afterlife generates thrills and satisfaction.Consequently, many of these movies end with “ghosts defeating the bad guys,” an incarnation of the axiom “both good and evil will always be rewarded,” a central feature of Buddhist philosophy.Because the supernatural entities in such movies are generally female, many believe that the narratives are essentially about empowering women. They claim that such films speak for women and evidence the care and worship of females in Thai culture.However, others argue that dying and becoming ghosts is actually the only way for women to defeat bad guys and to revolt against patriarchy. Only by gaining supernatural powers in the afterlife can women finally obtain any sort of justice.

This justice, however, is totally unrelated to women’s efforts to achieve self-liberation and selfempowerment. Rather, it is an attempt to uphold phallocentrism to relieve anxiety by imagining women as the enemy after male dominance has been consecutively impacted by feminist and LGBTQ movements in modern Thai society.

Women are seen as objects for aesthetic appreciation, and when beauty is shattered, ugliness excites the audience.

Images of Women

In 1975, Laura Mulvey wrote in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” her classic work on feminist movie theory, that the camera is not gender-neutral.Rather, filming devices “l(fā)ook at women” by imitating the male perspective, creating visual pleasure based on the binary opposition characterized by men and women, subject and object as well as looking and to-be-looked-at-ness. Laura Mulvey sharply criticized classic Hollywood narrative films, but even today, such binary structure, which becomes more indistinguishable with continuous changes of form, is still pervasive in various types of film and television works.

Thai horror movies are no exception. One major function of female ghosts is to be seen as “spectacle.” They tend to have “two faces”: beautiful and innocent as a humanoid, hideous and repulsive as a ghost.Thus, young and gorgeous actresses are often selected to play the role to demonstrate this female attractiveness through lens language, but when the beauty becomes a beast, their looks become appalling instead of seductive: Ghastly pale skin and bleeding wounds create a sharp contrast to horrify the audience.

One example of such contrast is Buppah Rahtree(2003). Buppah, the female lead, is a beautiful,vulnerable, and innocent high school girl in the first half of the movie, but after death, she appears with a swollen, festering face and blood all over her body.Such a grisly contrast has become the paradigm for this genre because it amplifies the visual value of women. Women are seen as objects for aesthetic appreciation, and when beauty is shattered, ugliness excites the audience.

In Thai horror movies, feminine beauty and ugliness are so closely connected that when a woman pursues beauty, she is destined to go mad and become a horrendous ghost. For example, in The Victim (2006), a crazy fan of a female celebrity is so obsessed with the star’s appearance that she finally becomes a ghost to take the celebrity’s body and mind. Another example is Take Me Home (2016), in which a rich girl born with a facial deformity agrees to let a female ghost take her body to become beautiful. And when women decide to use such beauty, they become a threatening creature for males.

Physical seduction by a woman is fatally dangerous in many Thai horror movies. For example, Phi Pob is a well-known ghost in Thailand that in folklore does not have a gender preference when it takes a person’s body. But in Thai horror movies, Phi Pob always chooses women as the host. In Body Jumper (2001), Phi Pob occupies school girls’ bodies and uses women’s attractiveness to prey on men.

Similarly, spirits of snakes, tigers, and even trees are not tied to a feminine image in folklore, but in movies like Tigress of King River (2002), Tiger Woman(2015), Mae Bia (2001, 2015), and Nymph (2009), the phantoms are all glamorous and sexy women who lure men deep into the forests to make them nature’s nutrients.

In Thai horror movies, women ghosts are both beautiful and deadly, and any attractiveness is like beguiling patterns on poisonous snakes that signals danger. These movies reinforce a binary relationship between female attractiveness and supernatural evil and demonstrate the patriarchy’s vilification of women through a philosophy of “beauty is danger,and beautiful women lead to disaster.”

Diminished and Deprived

In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey also wrote that the visual pleasure of watching movies comes from not only watching the other person, but self-projection, which explains the appeal of Thai horror movies as it invites people to look at various forms and statuses of women and enables them to project themselves into the male roles and feel the horror and fear of being haunted by women.

The male characters in Thai horror movies are generally morally-flawed. They have to run for their lives to escape being hunted by women ghosts. Yes,these men are despicable cowards, but for the human audience the story is humans versus ghosts, so the male roles are the only carrier of the watchers’ selfprojection. People follow the men’s steps and use their eyes to gain this experience of “encountering ghosts,” and such a relationship and story logic further segregate the roles of the women ghosts from “us humans,” labeling the females as “others”.

However, behind the ghosts’ seemingly omnipotent supernatural force, women are always victims struggling to escape mistreatment and misery. A model narrative of the genre follows three steps. First, highlight the cruel and fierce qualities of women ghosts. Then, tell of the miserable lives of these women, and finally, reveal that their deaths were directly or indirectly a result of torture and maltreatment by men. Such a narrative is quite typical in Thai movies including Shutter (2004), the Art of the Devil series (2004-2008), Pen choo kab pee(2006), 9-9-81 (2012), and The Swimmers (2014).

Though the trigger for women to become ghosts is generally men cheating, committing sexual assault, or performing acts of betrayal, most Thai horror movies omit scenes showing the direct torture of women by men, and normally these battered women lose their lives either to accident or just by committing suicide.This enhances the vulnerability of the female image,satisfying the male inner desire to dominate women,and tones down the men’s cruelty and evil because they are not the direct murderers of women.

A still from Nang Nak.

A still from 9-9-81.

A still from 11 12 13 Scary Holiday.

Females in Thai horror movies also have diminished identity because they are depicted as eager to be attached to men. These women, human or ghost alike, are always trapped in an obsession about attaining a man’s love and a happy family. When they gain supernatural powers in the afterlife, they are still deprived of self and exist as a man’s appendage.

For example, Thailand’s most famous ghost story is Nang Nak the Ghost Wife, a folk legend about love between a living man and a female ghost. Nang Nak does not want to leave her husband after death, so she pretends to be a living person and continues to live with her man. The story has been told on screen dozens of times, and Nang Nak’s image undergoes a lot of changes in the consecutive adaptations, but her final goal is always to keep her husband, because without family, her existence is meaningless.

Another example is 11 12 13 Scary Holiday (2016).The female protagonist is in desperate love with her boyfriend. She forgives his drug use and violence towards her, and after being killed by the man, she still stays with him and even becomes his ghost girlfriend after he dies in a car accident.

Another trope seen in Thai horror movies is women competing for men’s love. The bride and her friend in 9-9-81, the man’s first wife and new lover in Pen choo kab pee, and twin sisters in Alone (2007)are all victims of competition to win a man’s love.Such stories mirror the strong narcissism of males as the subject, as they believe that women cannot live without men and must become men’s appendages,but otherwise women exist for nothing.

A still from Shutter.

Male Anxiety

Women ghosts tend to have contradictory qualities in Thai horror movies. They are beautiful and seductive but dark and cruel. They are powerful and fierce but vulnerable and lowly. They take revenge on men with supernatural power, but they desperately yearn for men’s love and aim to be a man’s appendage. In the context of Thai society undergoing transformation towards gender awareness, the contrasts are essentially a symbol of the ambivalent male attitude towards the improvement of women’s social status.

Thailand has been a hot spot for gender-related movements. The traditional gender structure in which men have all or most of the power and importance has been continuously impacted in recent years: In 2020, the feminist movement helped relax restrictions on abortions in the Constitution of Thailand, and the LGBTQ movement facilitated legalization of gay marriage. Images of men have also shifted in Thailand, as the traditional masculine male image, represented by Tony Jaa, a Thai martial arts movie star, has gradually faded from screens. Instead,Fujoshi Culture, which originated in Japan and is known for girls reading male homoerotic texts, and Danmei, a genre focused on romantic relationships between men, have risen.

Buppah, the heroine of Buppah Rahtree, is a beautiful, vulnerable, and innocent high school girl in the first half of the movie.

These changes have led to strong anxiety among males and impacted their attitudes towards women.While accepting that girl power is becoming increasingly significant, men don’t want their status to be threatened. This ambivalent attitude is clearly shown in Thai horror movies through a man’s perspective, as women ghosts, despite their attractiveness and powerfulness, are crazy about being attached to men. In these narratives, however,real women are absent because there is no selfexpression. Women are just seen, imagined, and differentiated by men, haunting as a means to manifest and alleviate male anxiety.

This article is part of phased research related to the project Development and Transformation of Genre Creation in Contemporary Thai Films, funded by the fundamental research programs of colleges and universities directly under the Central Government of China.