The Gothic is undergoing a pronounced resurgence in academic and popular cultures. Propelled by fears associated with massive social transformations produced by globalisation, the neoliberal order and environmental uncertainty – tropes of the Gothic resonate. The gothic allows us to delve into the unknown, the liminal, the unseen; into hidden histories and feelings. It calls up unspoken truths and secret desires.In the tropics, the gothic manifests in specific ways according to spaces, places, cultures and their encounters. Within the fraught geographies and histories of colonisation and aggression that have been especially acute across the tropical regions of the world, the tropical gothic engages with orientalism and postcolonialism. The tropics, as the region of the greatest biodiversity in the world, is under enormous stress, hence tropical gothic also engages with gothic ecocriticism, senses of space, landscape and place. Globalisation and neoliberalism likewise impact the tropics, and the gothic imagery of these ‘vampiric’ capitalist forces – which impinge upon the livelihoods, traditions and the very survival of peoples of the tropics – is explored through urban gothic, popular culture, posthumanism and queer theory.As the papers in this special issue demonstrate, a gothic sensibility enables humans to respond to the seemingly dark, nebulous forces that threaten existence. These papers engage with specific instances of Tropical Gothic in West Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Southeast Asia, northern Australia, and the American Deep South.
This article revisits two of the most iconic Thai monstrosities, phi pop and phi krasue, whose changing representation owes equally as much to local folklore, as to their ongoing reinterpretations in popular culture texts, particularly in film and television. The paper discusses two such considerations, Paul Spurrier's P (2005) and Yuthlert Sippapak's Krasue Valentine (2006), films that reject the long-standing notion that animistic creatures belong in the countryside and portray phi pop and phi krasue's adaptation to city life. Though commonplace, animistic beliefs and practices have been deemed incompatible with the dominant discourses of modernization and urbanization that characterise twenty-first century Thailand. Creatures like phi pop and phi krasue have been branded as uncivilised superstition and ridiculed through their unflattering portrayals in oddball comedies. This article argues that by inviting these monsters to relocate to contemporary Bangkok, Spurrier and Sippapak redefine their attributes for the modern urban setting and create hybrids by blending local beliefs and cinematic conventions. The creatures' predatory character is additionally augmented by the portrayal of the city as itself vampiric. The article therefore reads these predatory spirits in parallel with the metaphor of the female vampire -a sexually aggressive voracious creature that threatens male patriarchal order and redefines motherhood.Keywords: phi pop, phi krasue, monsters, evil spirits, Thai horror film, the monstrous feminine f we define the vampire as an undead revenant sustained by consuming (preferably human) blood, then it is safe to say there are no vampires in Thailand. This does not mean, however, that Thai monster 1 lore is free of beings that could be called "vampiric", in a sense that they need to feed off humans to survive. The two most culturally widespread examples include phi pop and phi krasue, creatures with an appetite for viscera and abject 1 The term "monster" is used rather loosely in the paper to refer to a corporeal creature that inspires fear. In the words of Judith Halberstam: "The monster functions as monster […] when it is able to condense as many fear-producing traits as possible into one body" (1995, p. 22). Since both phi pop and phi krasue can be at the same spiritual and corporeal creatures, they are simultaneously spirits and monsters.
Horror films have played a significant role in introducing Thai cinema to international audiences and therefore inspiring Thai film-makers to produce films that could be globally marketable. Though successful with broader Thai population, Thai horror films have been repeatedly rejected by Bangkok urbanites as formulaic ‘low-class’ entertainment. The unprecedented success of Sopon Sukdapisit’s Ladda Land (2011) with Bangkok audiences reflects the recent change of direction in Thai horror to cater to the tastes of the middle classes, and invites a more thorough investigation. The article uses the example of Sukdapisit’s Ladda Land to discuss the effects of modernization and globalization processes on the development of the Thai horror genre, in particular with relation to the concept of the ghost as the figure of fear. With its reconfiguration of the typical Thai ghost story formula, Ladda Land brings horror closer to home for its middle-class audience but does so at the cost of replacing its earth-bound past-oriented revenants with the living ghosts, trapped within the temporality of a dream of social mobility and economic success.
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