- Title
- Westernizing Southeast Asian cinema: co-productions for 'transnational' markets
- Creator
- Aquilia, Pieter
- Relation
- Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies Vol. 20, Issue 4, p. 433 - 445
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304310600987254
- Publisher
- Taylor & Francis
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2006
- Description
- While the horror genre has a rich narrative tradition in the Malaysia Peninsula, it is experiencing a new surge of popularity as part of Singapore national cinema. Recent productions such as The Maid (dir. Kelvin Tong, 2005) reposition the genre more towards a Western stylization of characters, storylines and effects, while retaining an Asian cultural flavour. The Maid is the most commercially successful Singapore-based co-production to date earning over S$2 million in the box office and distributed internationally by Fortissimo Films. While it draws on traditional Asian folktales and mythologies, this new Singapore horror film adopts popular themes and tropes of contemporary Hollywood and East Asian cinema, which this paper argues gives the film a transnational currency. The Maid, as the first significant international commercial success for the Singapore film industry, takes the local horror film out of the jungles and into the city, suggesting the genre is also moving away from its local roots towards more universal cinema conventions. This article explores this shift and proposes that The Maid is a crafted hybrid of the local, Hollywood and New Wave Asian horror cinemas, which works towards the internationalization of Singaporean films.
- Subject
- Southeast Asian cinema; horror films; The Maid; mythologies
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/926788
- Identifier
- uon:9944
- Identifier
- ISSN:1030-4312
- Language
- eng
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