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,
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