‘My Mother, the Ap’: Cambodian Horror Cinema and the Gothic Transformation of a Folkloric Monster

Abstract

The most prominent monster in Khmer horror cinema, the ap, is originally a creature of folklore and is traditionally depicted as a woman's glowing head connected to exposed, floating entrails. I begin with an overview of the ap's historical origins in Khmer folktales about female transgression and witchcraft. I then discuss the ap's reemergence in Gothic horror film following the Khmer Rouge genocide of 1975–1979. In film, unlike in folklore, the ap is depicted as an innocent woman who was violated and then denied justice from her insular rural society; her assumption of a monstrous spectral body serves to make visible and undeniable the otherwise invisible violence exacted upon her. In staging dramas of reckoning and unburial, I argue, ap film in twenty-first-century Cambodia performs the typically Gothic work of using folklore and the supernatural to speak about otherwise unspeakable past trauma.