I know indeed what evil I intend to do
But stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury
Fury that brings upon mortals the greatest evils.
– Medea, Euripides
A girl lies battered on the floor of a house whose inhabitants have been tormented by an onslaught of inexplicably violent, macabre events. As the camera pans across the accusatory specks of crimson on her nightdress, she flutters her eyelids open. "Do you know what’s really scary?" intones an older woman, who stands over her. "You want to forget something – totally wipe it out of your mind – but you never can. It can’t go away, you see. And it follows you around like a ghost."
This is a scene from the South Korean horror film A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), based on a Joseon-era folktale about a woman who slanders both her stepdaughters and has them killed out of jealousy. Her nefarious deed leaves death and malady in its wake across her village. Only when evidence is produced of the sisters’ innocence, and the stepmother is sentenced to death, is order restored in the tiny community.
Many memorable horror films are underpinned by a philosophy that illustrates how justice can be delivered to a grotesquely unjust state of affairs, and this need for catharsis is often incarnated in unearthly characters like the wrathful woman. Seething with malevolence, the figure of a pallid woman whose dark hair conceals her face is de rigueur in Asian horror cinema. Everything about her appearance triggers fear, from the sudden, raptorial movement of her limbs to the wetness that seems to cling to her – a somatic reminder of, often, a heinous crime that has been covered up. She goes by different names across the region: in South Korea, she is a wonhon; in Japan, an onryo; in Indonesia, some versions have her as a Pontianak; while in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos she manifests herself varyingly as a krasue, ahp or kasu.
Whatever form she takes, this is a woman who has borne the brunt of life’s cruellest vicissitudes. She lingers after death to remind the living of their sins, weaponising her ugliness to preserve the memory of her horrific story. Her existence on screen serves a specific function: to prompt an awakening to a hidden truth, and to precipitate the other characters’ journey towards redemption.
In A Tale of Two Sisters, the girl, Su-mi (Im Soo-jung), and the older woman, her stepmother Eun-joo (Yum Jung-ah), are revealed to be the same person. Su-mi’s hallucinations of two different personalities – that of her twin sister, Su-yeon (Moon Geun-young), and Eun-joo – stem from her guilt over contributing to Su-yeon’s accidental death.
Once Su-mi has come to terms with her culpability in Su-yeon’s death, the house exorcises itself of the misfortunes that have befallen its inhabitants by claiming Eun-joo, the film’s antagonist. It’s only when Su-mi leaves the house, which has been the site of so much trauma, that she’s able to accept what happened and find some spiritual and psychic distance from her grief. Much like in the folktale, the image of the vengeful female ghost is deployed to bring fairness to an abject situation and to redress a sin.
However, the presence of malevolent female spectres in Asian horror can also push characters to make critical, righteous decisions under moral circumstances that may be nebulous at best, and ambivalent at worst. An excellent example of this is Kimo Stamboel’s The Queen of Black Magic (2019). The nightmarish wraith of Ibu Mirah (Ruth Marini) stalks the grounds of an orphanage, where she was murdered under the pretext of having practised black magic. In fact, she had been framed for trying to rescue a group of girls from the orphanage’s paedophilic director, Pak Bandi (Yayu AW Unru). Her return from the dead is fuelled by a desire to avenge herself against the patriarchal inequalities that made the allegations of her witchcraft seem larger than Pak Bandi’s foul villainy, eclipsing it completely.
One of the film’s protagonists, Hanif (Ario Bayu), realises that Mirah is not simply seeking reprisal: her rage has turned her against reason, driving her to kill the rest of the children so they won’t suffer the same fate as those unfortunate girls. Hanif eventually slays Mirah by decapitating her. The act of beheading rectifies Mirah’s twisted miscarriage of justice, symbolically severing her anger and putting pause to the train of destruction she has caused.
Likewise, in Joko Anwar’s Satan’s Slaves (2017), the monstrous feminine is given human shape in a mother who has pledged her youngest child to undead members of a Satanic cult on his seventh birthday. As the rest of the family is wracked by terrifying apparitions, they also learn to grapple with their mother’s deed, and the secrets that she has kept throughout their lives. Along the way, they are guided by their deceased grandmother, who initially terrorises the household. They realise that their grandmother’s agonised attempts to reach out are well-intentioned, and that she has been trying to help them to break the family curse.
At the heart of this film is the excruciating quandary faced by the family: which woman should they trust to deliver their fates? Only by making the right choice can they escape the web of lies that has been spun around them and find freedom in the harsh reality of what their mother has done. Here, the expression of sinister womanhood is more complex – it is personified as moral frailty in the mother, but righteousness in the grandmother. The film goes to great lengths to show that neither depiction of femininity is false, and that to be female is to be multifaceted. To deny the mother’s transgressions is also to reject the grandmother’s virtue and dignity. The children are driven to make peace with the decisions of both women so they can move on with their lives.
The quintessential female ghost can also represent purity emerging from a miasma of evil. Her appearance may mark a crossroads in another character’s story, as they struggle to arrive at a revelation. In Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing (2016), the woman in white, Moo-myeong (Chun Woo-hee), is cast as a harbinger of all things unholy, despite the multiple warnings she sends to the protagonist, Jong-goo (Kwak Do-won), about the true source of the village’s misfortunes.
His failure to appreciate her kindness dooms him to tragedy, and he realises too late that he has been deceived by the village shaman, whom he has trusted throughout the film. The price Jong-goo pays for his inability to see past Moo-myeong’s eerie demeanour is costly – his entire family is murdered. The pristine whiteness of Moo-myeong’s dress, and of the flower amulet that she hangs at the door of his home, are especially poignant. They signify her final efforts at creating a physical barrier of goodness against the encroachment of the diabolical. When Jong-goo makes the decision to shun her advice, the flower amulet wilts, indicating the triumph of the fiendish forces surrounding the village. It’s only at the end of the film that the viewer realises that Moo-myeong has been desperately playing a Cassandra-like role the whole time, her prophecies falling on deaf ears.
Occasionally, it’s the female protagonist herself who is simultaneously frightening and heroic, bringing visibility to injustices that must be remedied. In the Laotian film Dearest Sister (2016), one of the main characters, Ana (Vilouna Phetmany), is gradually losing her sight. As her vision dissipates, she’s increasingly immersed in the liminal, phantasmagorical space between the living and the dead. She develops a keen sense for the wrongdoing and corruption unfolding around her, which, ironically, she failed to see before she went blind.
Ana’s physical transformation is striking, as it mirrors the unmasking of greed and deceit in the people she cares for the most. Her husband’s non-profit business, which is run under the auspices of the United Nations, is under investigation for fraud, while her timid cousin turns out to have been stealing from her. It’s as if the ugliness of their behaviour is personified in her being.
In other films, such as Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), the concept of the female lead as fearsome saviour and antihero vigilante is executed with generous touches of comedy. A chador-clad girl (Sheila Vand), whose name the audience never finds out, skateboards around the streets of Tehran. The wearing of a garment commonly associated with vulnerability and oppression is subverted here, as she sucks the blood and life out of morally questionable male characters, including a local pimp and an elderly drug addict who is a constant source of trouble for his industrious son.
In a world where women are repeatedly denigrated and shamed for exercising their agency, it seems most obvious to think of this panoply of unnerving, terrible, sympathetic and awe-inspiring female ghouls as embodying a disquieting method of protest. But by simply stopping there, we do a disservice to their imaginative potential. Perhaps they do far more than lash out in indignance and fury against the living. They prod us to examine the wickedness – no matter how deeply buried – that flickers in each of us. These women remind us that being good can often mean choosing to walk the path of greatest resistance, and that atonement may be difficult but worthwhile.
– Amandas Ong is a London-based freelance journalist. Her work is focused on social justice issues, in particular how inequalities cut across class, gender and nationality. She has written for Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Slate and other publications.
This essay was originally published in Goddess: Fierce Women on Film (2023). Grab your copy today.