Haunting Indonesia: Kuntilanak as the Traumatic Real of a Patriarchal Order 

[page 85] Abstract: Kuntilanak is a ghost well-known in popular culture in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. The vampire-like female ghost also plays a crucial role in the founding myth of the city of Pontianak. By analyzing the motives and structures of Kuntilanak narratives, this article suggests that the horror of Kuntilanak originates from her place outside the symbolic order of patriarchal society. She dwells in the Lacanian Real and represents what Julia Kristeva has termed abject. Thus it is argued that Kuntilanak is not simply a product of Indonesian society, but that society is also her product in the sense that only through the act of excluding her, abjecting her, does society retroactively emerge as a seeming whole, as a symbolic order. This opens up new ways of developing a radical critique of the given social order in Indonesia, a critique which would give body to the negativity of Kuntilanak. 

Keywords: Kuntilanak, Indonesia, Lacan, abject 

There is hardly any ghost in Indonesian and Malaysian popular culture as famous as Kuntilanak, a vampire-like figure usually depicted with female features. In the pantheon of the ghosts of the Southeast-Asian archipelago (in Indonesia termed Nusantara, the land in-between), she always appears beside other well-known ghosts like Pocong (an undead corpse wrapped in white cloth) or Tuyul (a sly little gnome). Yet Kuntilanak is probably the most iconic of them. Kuntilanak is the subject of many horror movies and novels, especially those appearing between 2001 and 2014, but the trope of Kuntilanak in horror movies reaches back as far as the 1950s and 1960s in then-British Malaya. It seems that societies in Nusantara are in need of the particular fear and shivers that Kuntilanak brings them. In many popular cultural narratives, Kuntilanak appears as the vengeful ghost of a woman who was raped and murdered. She seduces men and is dangerous to babies and pregnant women (and threatens the reproduction of society itself). Usually living in or under tall trees, she is a creature of [page 86] the night, with long black hair and white clothes. She can be controlled by a spike or nail in her head. When it is inserted, she is an ordinary woman, but without the spike, she becomes the terrifying ghost. In Indonesia and Malaysia, there are many local versions of Kuntilanak-like ghosts. For instance, in Jakarta, Si Manis Jembatan Ancol (The Sweet Girl from Ancol Bridge) is feared, and in Makassar, the ghost of Sumiati is said to haunt a park in the city where she was murdered. Also, the monstrous ghost of Sundel Bolong, which is infamous through out Indonesia, has many similarities with Kuntilanak in her appearance. She is female too, vengeful, and is said to be the ghost of a prostitute who was raped and murdered. While these motives and concepts of female ghosts are widespread throughout Indonesia, Pontianak in West Kalimantan is known as the city of Kuntilanak. In Malaysia, Kuntilanak is in fact known as Pontianak. 

In the following, I engage with two types of narrative, namely local narratives from the city of Pontianak where the monstrous ghost is prominent in the founding myth of the city, and narratives in popular culture in Indonesia. My aim is to demonstrate that the monstrosity of Kuntilanak is not simply a product of society or, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen put it in his essay on monster culture, that the “monster is born only . . . as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment” and that it is a “construct and a projection” (4). Rather than claiming that Kuntilanak is a construct or projection of society, I suggest that society, or more precisely the patriarchal symbolic order that gives meaning, laws, and structure to society, is a product of the monstrous ghost: Kuntilanak is what is abjected in the sense of Julia Kristeva. This process of abjection, of making Kuntilanak an abject of society, happens in order to constitute in the first place what abjects, namely society: Kuntilanak represents that which cannot be incorporated into the symbolic patriarchal order, and thus haunts society by being a marker of its own impossibility. Her terror lies in the fact that she is pure negativity to society. While she is usually depicted as a female ghost, her identity as the uncontrolled horror outside [page 87] the symbolic order is, I suggest, rather non-female, as she violently rejects all paradigms of femininity that the patriarchal order attributes to women. She remains the object of male desire, yet an object which always has to be repelled and excluded. As such, she is also a non-male. Thus, this article explores rather new representations of Kuntilanak in social media and contrasts those with older horror narratives. Here, I suggest that a step towards identification with the ghost opens up new routes to a social critique of alienation within Indonesia’s capitalist yet increasingly conservative society. 

By analyzing the narratives about Kuntilanak, I will show how this monstrous ghost fits well into Cohen’s other thesis of what it means to be a monster. For instance, Kuntilanak is a monster who always escapes and returns as the repressed (Cohen 4, 16). The fear that she spreads is actually a form of desire (16-20), and she is a category of difference, “an incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond” (7). However, as mentioned above, I argue that Kuntilanak is not simply the child of her society (cf. Cohen 20), but rather, society is her child. She can enable us to see the plain truth of the patriarchal order which rejects her, namely, that this order is actually empty. Thus, I argue that she can inspire an emancipatory politics of hysteria wherein people unlearn to identify with the psychotic foreclosure that the symbolic order offers. Hysteria, in this sense, is not a dismissive term but a place where something new can emerge (Žižek et al. 425). 

The Origins of Kuntilanak 

In the city of Pontianak in the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan, the ghost is closely related to the city’s founding myth. During my visits to the city between 2017 and 2018, I talked a lot with locals about Kuntilanak, and besides ghost stories of the vengeful, terrifying female vampire common throughout Indonesia and Malaysia, they often mentioned Kuntilanak’s role in the city’s founding myth. When in 1771 Syarif Abdurrahim and his men came to the confluence of the Kapuas and Landak rivers—an important trade route that [page 88] was at that time often beleaguered by pirates—with the intention of establishing the city, the men were terrified when they heard Kuntilanak’s voice from the large trees beside the river, and they refused to disembark. Sultan Syarif Abdur rahim fired cannons and successfully banished Kuntilanak. The trees she used to live in were cut down and used to build the mosque, the sultan’s palace, and ordinary houses (Devanastya et al. 23). 

Kalimantan’s animist societies recognize the existence of a category of invisible beings which in Indonesian are often referred to as penunggu, those who are waiting at a certain place. These are place-bound spirits, usually residing on hills, rocks, rivers, or small trees. It is a category of spirit wide spread in Southeast Asia, a category that Kaj Århem has termed owner spirits (296-297). Through rituals and other means of communication and exchange, these spirits are domesticated to a certain degree. What appear to humans to be natural features of the environment are houses for spirits. These spirits have cultural rules just like humans, yet are invisible, and humans can communicate with them in dreams and rituals. This is especially important when people want to establish a new field or settlement, as they need the penunggu’s permission. In Kalimantan’s animist societies, there are no owner spirits that are intrinsically malevolent; rather the malevolent quality of a spirit derives from its role or behavior due to the treatment that it experiences at the hands of humans. Keith Sillander noted that for the Bentian Dayak, different categories such as “malevolent spirits,” “spirit helpers,” “protecting spirits,” and “custodians” “do not desig nate specific spirits or spirit categories, but rather, ways in which spirits generally may influence people” (161). While it is the case that spirits connected with deep forests or special features of the environment can be dangerous and are associated with soul stealing, in healing rituals a social relation and negotiation which includes paying respect (besemah) to the spirit (blis in Bentian) and buying back the soul (sentous) is crucial. The blis, or, in Indonesian, penunggu [page 89] are, in this sense, like humans, able to cooperate as well as able to be threatened, depending on their mood and treatment by humans. This is also what I have observed among Dayak communities in West Kalimantan: interaction with spirits is common, and rather than being seen as ghosts, they have what Guido Sprenger calls “non-human personhood” (265-290). This personhood makes them relatable and provides means of keeping them under control. 

With the advent of Islam and the conversion of some parts of society, there was a significant shift in the perception of these spirits: the non-human persons (penunggu) became terrifying ghosts that had to be banished. In other words, they lost their personhood. That process of banishing Kuntilanak is constitutive for the modern Malay society in Pontianak (Duile 279–303): it is the exclusion of a female ghost that appears only because of what excludes her, namely the Islamic Malay civilization, the masyarakat madani (on this term, see Alatas 173). Whereas penunggu can be any gender, Kuntilanak is necessarily female because the concept of untamed femaleness is constitutive for the modern Malay patriarchal society. She also represents untamed nature. According to some infor mants, the Malaysian name Pontianak refers to tall trees (ponti = pohon tinggi, tall trees), meaning that she is the child of the tall trees (Asma xxxiii). That founding myth is still told today in Pontianak, and one can still find cannons along the river which have now become a part of Malay cultural heritage. In 2017, there was even a debate in Pontianak about establishing a giant statue of Kuntilanak in order to attract tourists (Nugroho). Of course, many found the idea of bringing her back to the city quite disturbing, and the idea was eventually dismissed. 

In Kuntilanak’s representation in popular culture, one can find similar tropes to those of the local myth in Pontianak: Kuntilanak’s female features, her long white dress, and the fact that she often dwells in large trees or in banana tree groves. Moreover, the ghost is often connected with lost places like abandoned houses. The idea here is simply that when [page 90] humans abandon their settlements, Kuntilanak returns and seizes the places that she once inhabited. In other words, the civilized sphere is always unstable and threatened. 

In this trope, we can see how Kuntilanak fits—and to some degree constitutes—what can be termed Malay modernity (Duile 296-300). Rather than a disenchantment of the world like in the West, in this form of modernity, the chain of equivalents and binaries embraces the supernatural, and Kuntilanak serves as a link between the civilized, Islamic, male-connoted realm of the cities and coastal areas on the one hand and the uncivilized, animist, female-connoted realm of the interior on the other. Kuntilanak constitutes this symbolic structure as she has become the marker of what has to be excluded in order to constitute the Malay identity, the civilized realm of the masyarakat madani. 

Kuntilanak in Popular Culture 

In popular culture in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, Kuntilanak lives on as the very marker of the radical Other that haunts society: what haunts society is the constant reminder of its own impossibility, the fact that there has to be something excluded in order to establish and maintain a social order, a coherent society. Kuntilanak in popular culture re flects similar tropes, as in the founding myth of Pontianak. The ghost represents what is banished but threatens to return. Between 2006 and 2018, there was a Kuntilanak boom in Indonesia, as she was a common protagonist in horror novels (for instance, Handoyo; Lovanisa; Wisanggenti) and especially horror movies. The Indonesian director Rizal Mantovani released his first Kuntilanak trilogy of films in 2006, 2007, and 2008. In 2009, Paku Kuntilanak (Kuntilanak’s Spike), a film by Findo Purwono HW, was shown in Indonesian cinemas. In 2010, director Yoyok Dumprink shot the horror movie Rintihan Kuntilanak Perawan (The Moaning of the Kuntilanak Virgin), and in 2011, Voodoo Nightmare: Return to Pontianak, by the Singaporean director Lay Jinn Ong, was released. The horror comedy Pacarku Kuntilanak Kembar, by Nuri Dahlia, [page 91] was released in 2012, and in the same year, the same studio released Santet Kuntilanak, directed by Nayato Fio Nuala. While the years between 2006 and 2012 marked the height of the Kuntilanak boom in Indonesian cinema, in 2018 Rizal Mantovani made another Kuntilanak horror movie, with sequels in 2019 and 2022. In 2023, the horror comedy Debunk Beraya (Debunk Celebrates), a sequel to the 2022 movie Debunk, by Malaysian director Reen Emran, was released. In both movies, the ghost Edna resembles Kuntilanak, as she is female and wears typical white clothes. This Malaysian movie is interesting insofar as Kuntilanak appears quite human-like, and her horror qualities are only due to the fact that Satan is her boss. 

In these movies, there are some common tropes that represent Kuntilanak and her horror. First of all, Kuntilanak is terrifying but also seductive. For instance, in Rintihan Kuntilanak Perawan, a young woman is possessed by Kuntilanak and seduces men. The fact that she approaches her victims talking in English adds to both her alienness and her seductive qualities. In the movie Paku Kuntilanak, the terrifying Kuntilanak is, just as in Pontianak’s founding myth, banished from the human sphere (in this case, a house). She is bound, tied up in a bag, and thrown in a river. However, she is released and returns, threatening women (as she drinks their blood and eats placentas) and seducing as well as frightening men. In the end, the viewer learns that she is seeking revenge because she was murdered. A prominent component of the movie is the paku, the nail, which is released from her head and sets free her uncontrolled, terrifying features. She attacks in the form of a ghost with supernatural powers and seduces men when she appears as a human woman. These common features represent the uncanny aspect of femaleness which is not only out of male control but effectively undermines male ness. However, Kuntilanak is not merely femaleness either, as she is dangerous to women, especially to pregnant women. 

It is probably no coincidence that the Kuntilanak boom took place between 2006 and 2012. During that period, the [page 92] reformasi era had come to an end, and Indonesia had entered what can be called the post-reformasi era. While a relatively liberal political framework was maintained, society and poli tics shifted significantly away from liberal perspectives and from brief democratic cosmopolitanism toward notions of Islamic nationalism (Bourchier 716-726). In that era, being Indonesian was to some degree redefined in a conservative, religious fashion, and in this era of uncertainty, the horror of a ghost pointed towards the impossibility of the patriarchal order and society in general, as conservative Islamic values and gender roles became more prevalent. The other important context is the repression of nature and the fact that nature is very much constructed through that repression and simul taneously constructs the realm of culture. During the so-called New Order era between 1967 and 1998, development (pembangunan) became a main objective of the authoritarian Suharto government. The pembangunan discourse stressed the necessity of exploiting natural resources for the sake of eco nomic growth, political stability, and access to income, health care, education, and employment (Arnscheidt 118). After Suharto, the need for development continued in Indonesia, but the destruction of natural landscapes increasingly caused environmental problems. There were, for instance, major hazes due to forest fires in 1997, 2006, 2009, and 2015, which were caused, in the main, by drainage of peatland which was converted into palm oil plantations. Kuntilanak represents the very idea of nature as the Other of human civilization, the Other outside the civilized realm who returns to haunt what has expelled her. In an era when the relationship with what is perceived as nature or female was renegotiated, it is not sur prising that Kuntilanak returned to the collective imagination. However, if we are able to see Kuntilanak not simply as a symbol or marker of femaleness or nature but rather as the marker of their impossibility, she can provide us with new political insights and forms of critique. [page 93]

Kuntilanak as the Lacanian Real of the Patriarchal Society 

For the further analysis of Kuntilanak, the Lacanian registers of the Symbolic (or, the symbolic order) and the Real are useful, as they also play a crucial role for Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Žižek, whose ideas are helpful for understanding the phenomenon of Kuntilanak and its consequences for society. Without getting into too much detail here, it should be mentioned that Lacanian psychoanalysis consists of three registers, the Imag inary, the Symbolic, and the Real. Whereas the Imaginary is the internalized image of a subject (which only exists in the Imaginary), the Symbolic or symbolic order consists of signi fiers and is code for language. Language is the prison in which subjects dwell, as there is no accessible meaning outside of it that can be incorporated into the world of meanings. The Symbolic is the order that determines the subject. It is the order of norms, laws, and rules of a specific society; it is also the register of the Big Other (Object A), a signifier that appears as independent and gives meaning to all other signifiers. Object A is the master which subjects obey so that they exist in a given symbolic order. Outside the symbolic order, only the Real exists, which must not be confused with our common under standing of reality. Instead, the Real is what escapes meaning as it cannot be incorporated into the existing symbolic order, and therefore, it traumatizes and threatens to undermine the symbolic order. The Real can never be fully grasped (for further explanation see, for instance, Julien).

Kuntilanak, as explained above, is often associated with female features, but most importantly, she is a female beyond male control—and this is what makes her so terrifying. In other words, she represents the monstrosity of women and tells us how, for instance, monotheism causes women to be per ceived as monstrous beings (Melati). In a patriarchal society, the fear of the uncontrolled woman must be expanded to all members of that society in order to uphold the patriarchal symbolic order as the universal symbolic order. That is why she is said to be dangerous not only to men (as she can seduce [page 94] and then kill them) but also to women, especially when they are pregnant. Kuntilanak is attracted especially to menstrual blood, placenta, and newborn babies, as she eats them. In other words, she threatens the female reproduction of society itself: the originally male fear becomes the universal fear of society. It is important to note that this universalized fear also fulfills the function of nullifying any empathy with Kuntilanak, often portrayed in popular culture as a victim of rape and/or femicide, as, for instance, in the movie Santet Kuntilanak. It therefore stabilizes femicide and rape as an inherent part of the patriarchal order. These are what Slavoj Žižek calls the hidden obscene of a given order, which seemingly appears to be its opposite but is in fact an integral part of, in this case, patriarchal order. But the obscene unwritten laws of patriarchy must stay in the shadows in order to sustain the power of a given order; they can never become explicit rules (Žižek, The Plague 99). This does not always come in the extreme forms of rape and femicide but often takes more common forms of sexual harassment like catcalling or nonconsensual touching (like in the movie Paku Kuntilanak). These are the obscene supplements that Kuntilanak makes explicit and rebels against. These obscene supplements of the patriarchal order produce terror for women, but it remains a terror which is only properly articulated through Kuntilanak, who is herself trau matizing. Women who experience this terror in everyday life occupy a special position since they can see the order for what it is—this is precisely Kuntilanak’s position. 

Through her revenge, Kuntilanak not only brings these obscene supplements to light and exposes them but also responds with her terror against that very order. We can see here how the symbolic order is unable to incorporate her and that she is beyond what can be signified as male or female in the given order. Therefore, I argue that it is wrong to say that Kuntilanak is simply female. Rather, she falls into the register of the Lacanian Real. She is outside the symbolic order, as she is too monstrous to be perceived. Kuntilanak represents what Julia Kristeva has called abject, an object which has only the [page 95] quality of being opposed (96). In Kristeva’s own words, the abjected is what “does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite . . . . Abjection . . . is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it” (97). Kristeva also stresses here that abjection highlights the fragility of the law which is code for symbolic order. Kuntilanak, in this sense, is abjected from society, culture, the human sphere, and patriarchy. She is, however, also the primer of society: she constitutes a cultural order through her exclusion, as becomes clear in the founding myth of Pontianak. Also, as argued above, she is not simply female as she also threatens women. In other words, she can be termed non female as she threatens female reproduction. However, as she threatens female reproduction under the patriarchal order, that is, an order under which female reproduction is the reproduction of the patriarchal order itself, she is also non male. She represents the traumatic dimension of femaleness which cannot be brought under control by men and violently rejects the rules of patriarchal society. When we talk about ‘non-male’ and ‘female’ here, it is crucial to bear in mind that ‘non-male’ and ‘female’ are entirely different things: being female means occupying a certain gender position within the established symbolic order. This is the place that Kuntilanak occupies when the spike is in her head, that is, when she is controlled by the phallic symbol. Being non-male, in contrast, points towards her position outside the symbolic order within the Lacanian Real. As female is the negation male, of the dominant signifier (the Big Other), being non-female makes her the negation of the negation within the Symbolic. Moreover, by directly threatening the male and negating the male, she is non-male in a way that cannot be symbolized as merely female. It demonstrates that the supposed master, maleness, is empty. Non-male is the marker of the impossibility of maleness itself, and it is precisely here that her traumatizing potential lies. [page 96] 

This has important political consequences: Kuntilanak is the marker of the impossibility of patriarchy and the society built upon it. Rather than challenging the patriarchal struc ture from a female perspective (that is, from within the given symbolic order), she challenges it from a point where maleness itself is said to be impossible: maleness only exists through exclusion, and she demonstrates that maleness actually only exists negatively. That is why her political implications are profoundly radical. One could simply argue that she is female and suggest listening to female voices, just as one could argue that society should go back to the animist social order which acknowledges the penunggu and thus live in harmony with nature, so to speak. Back to animism, back to the roots, or to femaleness as seemingly fixed identities within the given social order. However, Kuntilanak’s monstrosity lies in how she points to the fact that there is no femaleness but the femaleness within the construction of the patriarchal order, that there is no nature but the nature constructed in order to give meaning to the signifier of the civilized, modern society. And, consequently, she highlights that this very patriarchal order—and the way modernity and modern society is conceptualized—is the problem. The lesson of Kuntilanak is not to claim that women do not possess monstrosity and that the female is simply equal to the male within the given order. Rather, she suggests that maleness and patriarchal society are impossible. They cannot exist on their own but depend on the abjection of the non-male, namely Kuntilanak. To illustrate these points, we can turn, for instance, to the movie Rintihan Kuntilanak Perawan. Kuntilanak appears as an Indonesian woman with foreign characteristics: her name is Alice, and she speaks English, wears revealing clothes, and has tattoos. She seduces men whom she then kills, yet she stresses her virginity. In the very first scene, she appears in a club seducing a male musician with the words “I am a virgin and I want to spend the night with you.” Later, it transpires that the members of an unsuccessful band (who are hunted and killed by Alice) wanted to sacrifice a virgin in a satanic ceremony for [page 97] the sake of their success. Kuntilanak, in this movie, is rather a state of being after a traumatic event, and this condition can only be ended by Alice’s sister. Kuntilanak, as a state, is the abject that falls from the patriarchal order, symbolized by the satanic ritual. This state is characterized by a specific portrayal of femaleness which is entirely contradictive: seductive, foreign, independent, yet still a virgin. As such, it contradicts all coherent notions of femaleness through signifiers of femaleness itself. Yet this state is also anti-male, as males become Kuntilanak’s prey. In that movie, Kuntilanak does not have the typical vampire-like features. However, what makes her Kuntilanak nevertheless is her threatening behavior and her uncontrolled femininity. 

Kuntilanak and Alienation 

Being between presence and absence, ghosts occupy a unique ontological position. Whereas Western modernity derives from the assumption of the disenchantment of the world, belief in ghosts is still widespread in countries like Indonesia or Malaysia. Ghosts are part of the common imagination and sometimes even everyday life. However, these perceptions are not static. I have argued above that during the Kuntilanak boom, especially between 2006 and 2012, Kuntilanak was usu ally depicted as a monstrous, uncanny, and threatening ghost. Recently, however, this representation has changed to some degree. In the abovementioned 2023 movie Debunk Beraya, for instance, Kuntilanak has rather human-like characteristics and emotions. Kuntilanak also became a trope in short comics widespread on social media. These usually four-panel comics— inspired by Japanese Yonkoma comics—adopt the trope of Kuntilanak in different ways, but usually without the terrify ing features she has in horror movies. There is, for instance, the comic series Tuti and Friends, which often spreads messages of proper behavior and relies on the cuteness of the protagonists, who are young children and include Kunti, a little Kuntilanak who is anything but frightening: Kunti appears to be very human-like, cute, and well-meaning. [page 98] Kuntilanak occasionally also appears in the more subversive Tahilalats comics. As these comics often depict the absurdity of everyday life in Indonesian society, ghostliness has a different function compared to that in Tuti and Friends. There is one Tahilalats comic in particular that has drawn my attention. First, one sees social media posts from Werewolf, Dracula, and the Mummy, showing off their interesting, exciting lives and achievements. Then it is revealed that Kuntilanak is viewing all these posts in loneliness and sad ness, sitting under a banana tree at night. Thus, she only receives attention from random idiots taking photos with her and making fun of her. Here, too, Kuntilanak appears as human, as she experiences an alienation that so many young people in Indonesia know too well. She is not excluded because she is a terrifying ghost but because she is estranged from the virtual reality of self-marketing as well as from the moronic people around her. Another example of a human Kuntilanak appeared in a 2017 Tahilalats comic strip. In a typical way, the ghost appears laughing “Hihihihi” and frightens a woman who, in a state of fear, then loses her wig and screams, “Go, leave me alone, leave me.” In the next panel, Kuntilanak just looks astonished and, finally, we see Kuntilanak, now also with short hair, enjoying coffee with the woman, asking her, “Since when did you decide to become like this?” Because of their common features, the strangeness and alienation of Kuntilanak have suddenly disappeared. 

Can the concept of Kuntilanak—a ghost banished from society in a process that became the constitutive act of establishing this society—help us to understand what it means to feel estranged and alienated in modern Indonesian society when people can finally now identify with her faith? What does her transformation from a non-human person (penunggu) to a terrifying ghost and to the embodiment of the ghostliness of human existence in an absurd society tell us? Is it possible to grasp what it means to feel alienated by bringing in the concepts of ghosts, spirits, and abjection? In order to make any social demand, to challenge the master, her haunting becomes [page 99] concrete and relatable as the oppressed female, as the alienated youth, as whatever is made invisible and is abjected. The interesting part here lies in the fact that she is not a subject of alienation but a Kristevan abject: there is no underlying true self, as she is merely negation. Kuntilanak is the abject of alienation. 

Conclusion: Kuntilanak and the Politics of Hysteria 

All societies have their traumas that they rely on, oppressed and repressed, yet haunting. If we want to take seriously what it means to be abjected, excluded, and repressed in Indonesian society, we must take the concept of ghosts seriously in a way that enables us to better understand these processes. What is excluded has no true nature, just as what excludes it is never simply there from the very beginning. Kuntilanak is neither subject nor object. I have argued that she is an abject and by her very nature, she dwells between absence and presence, terrorizing society from beyond. 

The play between exclusion and inclusion also becomes apparent when we compare the different layers of Kuntilanak narratives mentioned in this article, namely, on the one hand, in the local myth in Pontianak, where Kuntilanak appeared as a terrifying ghost instead of an owner spirit, who is in local animism part of society and, on the other hand, the Kuntilanak narratives in popular culture. The most apparent difference is that she usually appears in popular culture as a ghost of someone who died a ‘bad death,’ usually a victim of rape and/or murder or someone who died in a childbed. It is worth noticing here that she becomes the victim of rape in popular narratives only outside marriage, as the patriarchal mind is unable to recognize rape within its institution of marriage. Kuntilanak then turns into the monstrous ghost and seeks revenge, whereas in Pontianak’s founding myth, she simply appears as a terrifying ghost from the very beginning. As I have argued, she was actually transformed into such a ghost since, with the advent of Islam and new concepts of society, the owner spirits could not be included in the new society. The narratives in [page 100] popular culture suggest that Kuntilanak turned into an uncanny and monstrous being because of a violation of the moral order (the obscene supplement of the patriarchal order). In the myth of Pontianak, Kuntilanak is vengeful without a cause. The narrative suggests that everything will be all right when Kuntilanak has taken her revenge and the spike is inserted in her head again, as in the ending of the Paku Kuntilanak movie. But this is an illusion that cannot hide the uncanny insight of the very impossibility of the social order and Kuntilanak as an expression of the Lacanian Real outside of the symbolic order. My suggestion here, therefore, is to read Kuntilanak’s cause as an expression of the actual terror women experience but which cannot be articulated within the patriarchal order as experiences of women and are therefore translated into the experiences of a monstrous ghost. 

As a Kristevan abject, Kuntilanak does not conform with the rules of the game. She is banished, yet “does not cease challenging [her] master” (Kristeva 96). She only can challenge her master—the male with the nail to control her, that is, the Lacanian Object A—from outside the game. Her position may point towards what one could understand as a radical critique of Indonesian society (and its symbolic order), namely a critique without the idea of the Woman/Female (that is, the signifier of the women within the Symbolic), and, simultaneously, without the idea of the Man/Male, the Lacanian Object A or Big Other of the patriarchal order. Simultaneously, she points towards an environmentalism without Nature, that is, an environmentalism from outside the symbolic order that relies on the dichotomy between culture and nature. In this sense, the politics of Kuntilanak would become aware of the fundamental antinomies of the current social order. In other words, it would be a politics of hysteria that radically resists any psychotic foreclosure, that is, the identification with the Lacanian Big Other. Hysteria means a good thing here, as it avoids and resists identification with the patriarchal symbolic order and can open up entirely new per spectives. Slavoj Žižek stresses that “in hysteria, the true [page 101] ‘master,’ the agent who effectively terrorizes the Master himself, is the hysterical subject with her incessant questioning of the Master’s position” (Žižek, “The Structure” 390). It is not only that Kuntilanak terrorizes her master, the patriarchal society symbolized by male figures that she terrifies and the reproduction of society that she threatens. She also enables us to incessantly question the master in the form of patriarchal order because that master is empty in itself and only fills this void by rejecting and expelling Kuntilanak. Kuntilanak’s poli tics of hysteria, of non-identification with the symbolic order, is not resistance within the given order but the consequent negation of that order. Subsequently, any new form of politics must not negate the radical gesture of Kuntilanak, which is the gesture of those who experience the terror of patriarchal order or the destruction of nature and who are unwilling to accept any notion of femaleness or nature that comes from that very order. Women who actually experience the trauma Kuntilanak is said to have experienced occupy a special posi tion: they take part in the patriarchal order but do not belong to it (like Kuntilanak with/without the nail). Their demand for the recognition of their experiences and their demand for change can be characterized as a concrete universal, as a position that is able to develop new universal laws beyond the patriarchal order out of concrete experiences and positions. 

Works Cited 

Alatas, Syed Fahrid. “Ideology and Utopia in the Discourse of Civil Society in Indonesia and Malaysia.” Islam and Politics in Southeast Asia, edited by Johan Saravanamuttu, Routledge, 2010, pp. 165-81. 

Århem, Kaj. “Southeast Asian Animism: A Dialogue with Amerindian Perspectivism.” Animism in Southeast Asia, edited by Kaj Århem and Guido Sprenger, Routledge, 2016, pp. 271-301. 

Arnscheidt, Julia. Debating Nature Conservation: Policy, Law and Practice in Indonesia. A Discourse Analysis of History and Present. Leiden UP, 2009. 

Asma, Ahman. Pontianak heritage dan beberapa yang berciri khas Pontianak. Literer Khatulistiwa, 2013. [page 102] 

Bourchier, David. “Two Decades of Ideological Contestation in Indonesia: From Democratic Cosmopolitanism to Religious Nationalism.” Journal of Contemporary Asia, vol. 49, no. 5, 2019, pp. 713-733. 

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, U of Minnesota P, 1996, pp. 3-25. 

Devanastya, Mirzadelya, et al. Ragam pesona Kalimantan Barat. Yayasan Khatulistiwa, 2011. 

Duile, Timo. “Kuntilanak. Ghost Narratives and Malay Modernity in Pontianak, Indonesia.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, vol. 176, 2020, pp. 279-303. Handoyo, Ve. Kuntilanak. Gagas Media, 2006. 

Julien, Philippe. Jacques Lacan’s Return to Freud: The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. New York University Press, 1994. 

Kristeva, Julia. “Approaching Abjection.” The Monster Theory Reader, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, U of Minnesota P, 2020, pp. 95-107.

Lovanisa. Kuntilanak Pondok Indah. Niaga Swadaya, 2014. 

Melati, Nadya Karima. “Monsterisasi Perempuan dan Mono teisme: Sebuah Perspektif Longue Durée.” Blog Sahabat Jurnal Perempuan, 1 Mar. 2022, www.jurnalperempuan.org/ blog-sjp/monsterisasi-perempuan-dan-monoteisme-sebuah perspektif-longue-duree. 

Nugroho, Bagus Prihantoro. “Wacana Patung Kuntilanak di Pontianak.” Detik News, 17 May 2017, news.detik.com/ berita/d-3503328/wacana-patung-kuntilanak-di-pontianak. 

Sillander, Kenneth. “Relatedness and Alterity in Bentian Human–Spirit Relations.” Animism in Southeast Asia, edited by Kaj Århem and Guido Sprenger, Routledge, 2016, pp. 157–180. 

Sprenger, Guido. “Buddhism and Coffee: The Transformation of Locality and Non-Human Personhood in Southern Laos.” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, vol. 33, no. 2, 2018, pp. 265-290. 

Wissangenti, Tirta. 13 kisah horror Kuntilanak. Gramedia, 2017. 

Žižek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. Verso, 2009.

 ---. “The Structure of Domination Today: A Lacanian View” Studies in East European Thought. Special Issue: The Many Faces of Slavoj Žižek’s Radicalism, vol. 56, no. 4, 2004, pp. 383-403. [page 103] 

--- et al. “Unbehagen and the Subject: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, vol. 15, 2010, pp. 418–428, doi:10.1057/pcs.2010.22. 

Filmography 

Debunk Beraya. Directed by Reen Eman, KL Motion Picture, 2023. 

Kuntilanak 1. Directed by Rizal Mantovari, MVP Pictures, 2006. 

Kuntilanak 2. Directed by Rizal Mantovari, MVP Pictures, 2007. 

Kuntilanak 3. Directed by Rizal Mantovari, MVP Pictures, 2008. 

Kuntlanak 1. Directed by Rizal Mantovari, Netflix Indonesia, 2018. 

Kuntilanak 2. Directed by Rizal Mantovari, MVP Pictures, 2019.

Kuntilanak 3. Directed by Rizal Mantovari, MVP Pictures, 2022. 

Pacarku Kuntilanak Kembar. Directed by Nuri Dahlia, Studio Sembilan Production, 2012. 

Paku Kuntilanak. Directed by Findo Purwono HW, Maxima Pictures, 2009. 

Rintihan Kuntilanak Perawan. Directed by Yoyok Dumprink, K2K Production, 2010. 

Santet Kuntilanak. Directed by Nayato Fio Nuala, Studio Sembilan, 2012. 

Voodoo Nightmare: Return to Pontianak. Directed by Lay Jinn Ong, Alliance Entertainment, 2001. 

Timo Duile studied Political Science, Philosophy, and Cultural Anthropology and received his PhD in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Bonn, Germany. He has been guest researcher and fellow at the Universitas Tanjungura (Pontianak, Indonesia), Universitas Hasanuddin (Makassar, Indonesia), Universitas Nasional (Jakarta, Indonesia), the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Carib bean Studies (Leiden, Netherlands) and L’Orientale (Naples, Italy). His research focuses on indigenous movements, (de-)democratization, religion, and non-belief, as well as on spirits and ghosts in Indonesia and Malaysia. 

MLA citation (print):

Duile, Timo. "Haunting Indonesia: Kuntilanak as the Traumatic Real of a Patriarchal Order." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 10, no. 1, 2024, pp. 85-103.