The pontianak, a terrifying female vampire ghost, is a powerful figure in Malay cultures, as loved and feared in Southeast Asia as Dracula is in the West. In animist tradition, she is a woman who has died in childbirth, and her vengeful return upsets gender norms and social hierarchies. The pontianak first appeared on screen in late colonial Singapore in a series of popular films that combine indigenous animism and transnational production with the cultural and political force of the horror genre.

In Alluring Monsters, Rosalind Galt explores how and why the pontianak found new life in postcolonial Southeast Asian film and society. She argues that the figure speaks to a series of intersecting anxieties: about femininity and modernity, globalization and indigeneity, racial and national identities, the relationship of Islam to animism, and heritage and environmental destruction. The pontianak offers abundant feminist potential, but her disruptive gender politics also unsettle queer and feminist film theories by putting them in dialogue with Malay epistemologies. Reading the pontianak as a precolonial figure of disturbance within postcolonial cultures, Galt reveals the importance of cinema to histories and theories of decolonization. From the horror films made by Cathay Keris and Shaw Studios in the 1950s and 1960s to contemporary film, television, art, and fiction in Malaysia and Singapore, the pontianak in all her media forms sheds light on how postcolonial identities are both developed and contested. In tracing the entanglements of Malay feminist animisms with postcolonial visual cultures, Alluring Monsters reveals how a “pontianak theory” can reshape understandings of anticolonial aesthetics and world cinema.

"Galt offers a rich and vivid history of the pontianak’s relevance to questions of race, gender, and Islam in the context of decolonization in the Malay peninsula. This book’s entwinement of local historiography with theorizations of the global comprises its bold and welcome intervention." - Film Quarterly

"A history lesson on this understudied cinematic culture and also a nuanced theoretical study that demonstrates the author’s knowledge of Malay cinema and contemporary cultural and cinematic theory. Though Galt centers on Malay cinema, the study will be invaluable for those interested in the horror genre and cinema in non-Western nations in general." - Choice Reviews

"Galt offers new insights for understanding decolonisation discourses in which knowledge categories and identity are questioned. Indeed, this book opens up new ways to study other mythical horror figures that put Western rationalisation at stake." - Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

"A truly unique achievement on multiple levels." - Journal of Vampire Studies

"Superlative scholarship. . .[Galt’s] research is wide-ranging and thorough, providing a groundbreaking understanding of a popular culture icon through the lens of decolonization." - East Asian Journal of Popular Culture

"Alluring Monsters is an insightful and sophisticated piece of work that illuminates how a popular film subgenre that features the most iconic hantu in the region facilitates a theoretical debate about world cinema. In addition, it serves as a conduit for multiple meanings and discourses that reflect colonial legacies and ideologies that continue to haunt postcolonial Malaysian and Singaporean societies." - Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia

"Trenchantly argued and eminently readable, Alluring Monsters will be of interest to anyone interested in feminist film criticism, the horror film, histories of world cinemas, and indeed, history as such." - Journal of Religion & Film

"[A] very rich decolonial book . . . what makes the book so fascinating and unique is its fertile dalliance with contemporary scholarship in other fields like ecocinema and new animisms, which are gaining some momentum in Southeast Asian cinema. Thus, while providing a rich foundation for students of Southeast Asian cinema, the book also carries a broader appeal beyond Asian studies." - Journal of Asian Studies

"Undoubtedly an important contribution to Malay cultures and cinema." - Asian Ethnicity

"Engagingly written and impressively well-researched." - Pacific Affairs