chapter 4 ‘Sundelbolong’ as a Mode of Femininity Analysis of Popular Ghost Movies in Indonesia
Maren Wilger
Introduction: Hantu Sundelbolong
Indonesian folklore is populated by various kind of ghosts or hantu.1 While they used to haunt the living through ghost stories (cerita hantu), in contempo- rary culture they are presented in multifaceted ways on the silver screen to tell modern ghost stories, and part of the discourse of modernization.2 In this chapter, I start with a short description of the nature of ‘Sundel- bolong’, one of the many vengeful female spirits in Indonesian lore, before providing a brief introduction to the political and cinematic background of
1 Hantu: ‘Spirit’, ‘specter’ (Heuken, 2009: 181). In general terms, ‘hantu’ contains more than the European/Western understanding of ‘spirit’ or the German ‘Geist’. The term hantu is also used to describe possession by demons and presents good and evil supernatural beings. It appears to be insufficient to use Western classifications, such as ‘undead’, ‘spirit’ or ‘vam- pire’ for Southeast Asian beings, since the categories of hantu are much more fluid than the Western ones. While an undead entity in the Western hemisphere is statically characterized as being completely apart from the living—as being dead—, cerita hantu contain the idea that those beings can be tamed and transformed back into a living and human form again. Indeed, hantu Sundelbolong can be transformed back into a human when a knife is driven through her neck. It seems like hantu have greater physical potency and effect the living more than Western spirits, the undead or vampires do. Hantu can, for example, steal infants, be created by ilmu hitam (black magic), and may be living as normal humans by day and ap- pear as hantu by night. A good example would be Nils Bubandt’s anthropological accounts on the ‘Suanggi’, an entity in the form of a young female mostly known in parts of eastern Indo- nesia. Bubandt states that this entity is known in North Maluku as ‘o tokata’ and is “[…] both a spirit AND a living person who carries out nefarious and cannibal acts at the orders of this spirt. The same duality of the witch as both spirit and malevolent human being is common throughout North Maluku” (Bubandt, 2012: 9). Those descriptions are similar to the Javanese ‘Penanggalan’, since both are known for separating their heads from the torso at night to let the disembodied head fly around. It is common for Southeast Asian ghosts to obtain several abilities, forms and states of being. See for example Benjamin Baumann’s paper within this volume for a detailed description of ‘Phi Krasue’, a Thai ghost that is known to separate its head from the body. 2 See Bräunlein (2009) for further elaboration on the entanglement of the discourse on ghosts and modernity.
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Indonesia. The main aim of this chapter is to extract features of Sundelbolong and its inherent representations of femininity in the horror movie Sundel- bolong (dir. Sisworo Gautama Putra, 1981) and two later productions, Legenda Sundelbolong (dir. Hanung Bramantyo, 2007) and the made-for-television film Urban Legend Sundelbolong (dir. Purnomo A. Chakill, 2009). ‘Hantu Sundelbolong’ (“Ghost of a perforated prostitute”) must be seen in the context of similar female spirits in Southeast Asia.3 As part of a large pan- theon of female spirits, depictions of her mingle with and are complementary to several ghosts in Malayan and Southeast Asian folklore. Sundelbolong is comparable to the Malaysian ‘Pontianak’, Indonesian ghosts ‘Kuntilanak’ and ‘Penanggalan’, as well as the Balinese ‘Langsuyar’/’Langsuir’. The myths about these spirits are diverse, overlapping and sometimes even contradictory. Thus, hantu Sundelbolong must be recognized as a hybrid creature exposed to sev- eral influences on the Malay Archipelago, and passed down through oral tradi- tions from one generation to the next (Siddique, 2002: 25–26). The first ethnographic accounts of Sundelbolong can be found in Clifford Geertz’s monograph from 1960, “Religion of Java”:
[…] A sundel bolong is a beautiful naked woman, but her loveliness is marred by the fact that she has a large hole through the middle of her back. She has long black hair which hangs down over her buttocks and so conceals the hole. Opinions seem to differ as to whether or not she is attractive to men. Some say that when a man sees her he is immediately frightened and runs away. Others say that on the contrary she is very at- tractive and usually asks the man to go off with her, an offer very difficult to reject. If he goes, however, she castrates him. geertz, 1960: 18
This understanding of Sundelbolong focuses on her outward appearance. She has long black hair and has a dangerous, femme fatale-like influence on men. But Geertz’s description does not include the cause of her death or her motive for stalking (predominantly) men. Popular sources state that Sundel- bolong died as a consequence of rape, giving birth to the resulting child in- side the grave. It is said that she is also interested in kidnapping newborns. Sundelbolong’s motive is revenge—a desire she satisfies by killing her former torturers (Argo Wikanjati, 2010: 48).
3 See Elisabeth Scherer in this volume for a similar example.