Browsing by Author "Ancuta, Katarzyna"
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    Medical Mysteries: Madness, Magic, Malevolent Doctors in Contemporary Thai Horror Film
    ( 2014) Ancuta, Katarzyna
    For some inexplicable reason, contemporary Thai horror fi lms seem to be obsessively featuring members of medical profession as central fi gures of evil, capable of committing unspeakable crimes and not even once presenting them in a more positive light. By doing so, the fi lms in question upset the typical horror balance of good doctors vs. mad/evil doctors and make one wonder about the possible rationale behind such negative representation of the profession. This article argues that the negative portrayal of medical professionals in contemporary Thai horror is to a certain extent reminiscent of the tensions between the offi cial and popular attitudes to Western bio-medicine and Traditional Thai Medicine (TTM) in Thai society. The article will also discuss the possibility that medical doctors, together with other members of the professional community, such as for instance architects, or journalists, represent a relatively high level in the Thai social hierarchy which can be openly criticized without much fear that the fi lms will be cut by censors. Last but not least, the article will look in more detail on Paween Purijitpanya’s debut feature The Body #19 (2006). Set within the less-than-glamorous world of medical professionals, the fi lm toys with the concept of the mental disease (schizophrenia), which in traditional Thai folk medicine has consequently been attributed to spiritual possession. This dual spiritual/medical nature of the mental disease in Thai popular perception, has allowed the fi lmmakers to create a fi lm that can be seen as simultaneously repeating and breaking the established Thai horror formulas. At the same time, while directing our attention to the notion of disease, the fi lm offers an interesting, though subtle (= strict censorship) representation of the disintegration of the traditional hierarchical Thai society and its values.
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    Spiritus ex machina : spectral technologies in Asian horror film
    (Assumption University Press, 2009) Ancuta, Katarzyna ; Assumption University. Graduate School of English
    Difficult as it may be to talk about a unified category of "Asian Horror Film," this article originates from an observation that in a great majority of Asian horror films (exemplified in this research by japanese, South Korean, Hong Kong, Chinese, Thai, Taiwanese, Singaporean and Vietnamese films) the horror film is almost equivalent with the "ghost" film. At the same time, it is relatively easy to notice that the celluloid representations of Asian spirits frequently do not comply with the Hollywood-established patterns, easily recognisable to a Western horror fan. This, to a certain extent can be said to reflect local religious beliefs, customs and traditions, as well as numerous Eastern aesthetic and philosophical values. Recently, however, many Asian horror films seem to convey a message that the spiritual world is in need of a technological upgrade. This, in turn, has a direct effect on the popular understanding and representation of the supernatural, as observed in everyday life in the said Asian cultures, and the idea of "the ghost" evolves. This paper examines the notion of spiritual technologies, understood in a twofold manner. On the one hand, based on an analysis of a number of contemporary East Asian and South East Asian horror films, the discussion will focus on the ways modern technologies, particularly visual and media technologies, have contributed to a shift in understanding the concept of the ghost. On the other hand, this paper will focus in more detail on the case of Thai horror cinema, where ghosts have become a narrative technique and ghost stories seem to have contributed to the development of cinematic technologies in general.