REFERENCES
Beng, L.Y. (2015). Yasmin Ahmad: Auteuring a New Malaysian Cinematic
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Suria Hani A.Rahman (2019). Screening Islam: The representations of religion and
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dissertation. Loughborough University. February 2019.
By:
Suria Hani A.Rahman, PhD, is a lecturer in Communication Program, Faculty of
Leadership and Management in Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM). She
obtained her PhD from Loughborough University, UK, majoring in Media Studies.
Her main research interests are film and television studies, specifically in
broadcasting and narrative analysis including the representation of religion/Islam and
gender in film/TV content.
Screening Islam in the Malay(sian) Horror Films: A Brief Discussion
Dr. Suria Hani binti A.Rahman
Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia
suriahani@usim.edu.my
Executive Summary:This paper highlights how horror films shape the way in which
Islam is represented in Malay films. In specific, the article will briefly explore the
horror genre and its representation in film, and then highlight how the monstrous
threat and the mainstream society are portrayed in the Malay horror films.
Introduction
In general, this paper highlights the idea that the usage of language, including
cinematic language, has always been politicalized and interlaced with power.
Proposed by well-known scholar Stuart Hall in a book Culture, society and the media
in 1982, “language and symbolisation lead to the politics of signification, involving
an ideological power to signify events in particular ways.” From that, it can be said
that “language” consists of an intersection between power, the events (i.e. issues), the
thoughts (i.e. expression of ideas) and a set of signs (i.e. words, sound and image) in a
meaning production, which Hall in 1997 termed as r epresentation.
Screening Islam in the Malay Horror Films
According to Professor Celestino Deleyto in 2012, an expert in film theory and
analysis, film genres “are categories, ways of explaining the world, which are
believed to function like predictable machines that the human being will be able to
wholly control.” The genre characteristic also allows critics to recognise, appreciate
and articulate similarities and differences among films, as Professor Barry Keith
Grant in 2007 stated that genre films feature standard ways of representing gender,
class, race, ethnicity, as well as what is being highlighted in this paper; religion.
As a cultural product, a film is regarded in Malaysia as being significant to
disseminate the brand of Islam. Indeed, investigating Malaysian film under the lens of
genre helps to highlight an apparent contradiction that characterises the circulation of
genre conventions across different national, cultural, and linguistic contexts. The
contradiction may happen even at the level of a single filmic text, as in the analysis
conducted by Suria Hani A. Rahman for her PhD research in 2019 that a film, in fact,
