Amanda Nell Eu

Interview by Sonia Lupher

May 15, 2021

A recording of the interview is also available on the Cut-Throat Women Vimeo Page.

In her two most recent short films, It’s Easier to Raise Cattle (Malay title: Lagi Senang Jaga Sekandang Lembu, 2017) and Vinegar Baths (2019), Amanda Nell Eu’s affinity for monstrous female characters is clear. Each film presents a folkloric figure from Malaysia or Southeast Asia—the Pontianak and Penanggalan, respectively—in ways that simultaneously foreground her monstrosity and reveal the personality of a character who happens to be monstrous, whether by circumstance or choice.

It’s Easier to Raise Cattle and Vinegar Baths share a slow, steady pace and female characters played with mesmerizing charisma by Sofia Sabri (the unnamed Pontianak in It’s Easier to Raise Cattle) and Ling Tang (Chin in Vinegar Baths). Each character must come to terms with her monstrosity or she sought it out in the first place; in both cases, her monstrosity is central to her activities and her personality, even as she maintains a strong, often caring, human core.

Apart from the pacing, use of mostly diegetic sound, and evident affection for the Pontianak and Penanggalan, Eu’s two films explore very different settings and experiences. It’s Easier to Raise Cattle is concerned with the intersections of female puberty, emerging monstrosity, and close friendship. Set in the jungle, the soundtrack consists mostly of humming insects and rustling leaves; the film’s lush, natural setting holds as powerful a presence as the Pontianak, before and after she transforms. Vinegar Baths, by contrast, addresses a mature monster, a maternity nurse who is approaching middle age and recruiting her younger patients to becoming fellow Penanggalans. It is set entirely indoors, within the sterile setting of a hospital awash with garish pinks, blues, and stark artificial lighting; the soundtrack consists mostly of humming fluorescent lights and the pulse of Chin’s Instagram feed, while she bobs along with upbeat dance numbers and devours fistfuls of fast food.

As Eu discusses in the interview below, horror inspired her to pursue film school, and she completed an MA in filmmaking at the London Film School before beginning her career with the short drama films Pasak (2012) and Seesaw (2015). After taking a brief break from filmmaking, Eu was given the opportunity to develop It’s Easier to Raise Cattle, through which she rediscovered and unapologetically embraced her love for horror stories and monstrous figures she grew up hearing about. Raised in Malaysia until she was 11, Eu spent her teen and young adult years in the UK before returning permanently to Malaysia, where she is now based and where her most recent films were made. While she shies away from mainstream horror tropes and storytelling techniques, her atmospheric films are quietly pulsing with a fresh, subjective, and loving perspective on monsters that have long influenced Malaysian culture. By reimagining these monsters from the perspective of the women who embody them, Eu explores the human experience of maintaining complex, messy, and frightening relationships to our bodies, while gently critiquing deeply-engrained fears around women’s bodies.

Eu’s honors include participation in the Berlinale Talents Campus and Locarno Filmmakers Academy. It’s Easier to Raise Cattle and Vinegar Baths have been lauded on several film festival circuits; the former was given a special mention at Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival and screened at Venice International Film Festival, while Vinegar Baths has toured in several iterations of Final Girls Berlin Film Festival’s “Best of the Fest” series and won awards at the SeaShorts Film Festival and Scream Asia.

This interview took place via Zoom on May 7, 2021.

Thank you so much for joining us. I’d like you to start off by telling us about your background and your work and how you would introduce yourself to someone you’re meeting for the first time.

Okay, I’m usually really bad at this. My name is Amanda Nell Eu. I am a filmmaker from Malaysia, based in Malaysia as well. I’ve made a few short films and I’m working on my first feature film, which I’m supposed to be shooting this year, so let’s see how it goes. [Laughs] At the moment, I’m making a lot of films that are kind of playing with genre and the horror genre particularly, but who knows what will happen in the future as well. That’s that I’m obsessed with at the moment.

Great. So tell us about how you came to horror. What is your own personal horror history? How and when you were drawn to it, and through what media specifically.

I think from a super young age. I think the culture in Malaysia has always been really engulfed in horror or spirits or folk tales, and you know, it’s just folk tales that is being passed on in the family, at school, amongst kids, amongst adults, telling kids all these stories, and it’s always to do with some kind of horror. I think in our culture we’re just obsessed with it, so ever since I was a kid, I would even buy anthologies of urban tales or scary things that happened on the highway at midnight, and I’d love reading them. And, I guess, particularly in the film world, I got really into it when I was maybe around fourteen or fifteen, and I started venturing out and watching black-and-white horror and old silent films that were with the horror genre. So it’s something that I’ve actually always loved, I’ve really loved the thrill of it. Some people are like, “oh, I’m terrified of horror,” but it just so excites me. It always excites me, since I was a little kid.

As a fan and viewer, then, is horror your primary genre of choice, and are you drawn to other genres in particular, either as a maker or a viewer?

As a viewer, yeah, I love watching everything or anything that’s good and fun—even if it’s not good actually, as long as it’s fun. But primarily, I am doing a lot more horror genre at the moment. I always say at the moment because things change and my interests change, but right now—definitely in the past, I’d say, about five or six years, it’s very much focused on the horror genre particularly.

You’ve worked and lived both in the UK and in Malaysia. I’d love to hear about the experience of bringing a film, particularly a short film, to fruition in each national context, specifically with funding or other logistics, and other details like that.

Yeah, so in the context of the UK, it’s because I studied there, so I was in the UK since I was eleven years old, went to school there, went to Uni there, went to film school there, and so very much brought up there, educated there. So after film school, I was making short films in the UK and kind of decided that I didn’t really fit in very well there, even though I’d spent so many years there, and I moved back to Malaysia where I also didn’t really fit in, because I was brought up somewhere else. And so it was a very strange period of what I wanted to say in terms of my shorts, but in terms of the practicality of filming and everything, I think both are quite similar, especially for short films, like in the UK, there’s obviously the national funding, which is BFI, where you can submit your application and you get a small amount for your short film, for example. And Malaysia does have something quite similar, we do have a film board called FINAS [the National Film Development Corporation Malaysia]. The only tricky thing with FINAS is that they do change their rules every few years, so it’s not consistent and you just have to be on your toes, but it’s there to help with funding for projects as well.

Great! Since you mentioned working on films as a student, your first two short films, Pasak and Seesaw, they’re not horror films, and certainly not in the same vein as It’s Easier to Raise Cattle and Vinegar Baths. I’d love to hear about your role in these projects and, in turn, what prompted your transition into writing and directing horror.

I have a lot to say about that. Of course, right after film school I made those two short films, Pasak and Seesaw, and I think, you know, in film school I thought that being a serious filmmaker meant creating drama films. I don’t know—I was just a really immature, kind of young, fresh-eyed filmmaker who was like “oh, I want to be a serious filmmaker, and people wouldn’t take me seriously if I play with genre, I have to make long-take drama about people doing nothing,” and I thought that was the way to go. And of course, that’s not the right answer, especially for me, and so I moved back to Malaysia and I actually had a really long break and I didn’t make any films for like, quite a few years, maybe four to five years, I didn’t write or direct, and I worked in the industry as other things. And then I got a chance to make a short film, which is It’s Easier to Raise Cattle, and everything kind of clicked by then, because I lived here for a few years, I really found what I wanted to say and I was a little bit more mature in understanding my voice, and totally going back full circle to my first love, which was horror, which I told you earlier. And it was horror that made me fall in love with cinema in the first place. So it took me so long to go around the circle and go, “hang on, the reason why I went to film school is because of horror films, and then I forgot about it,” and I had to wait until I was a lot older to realize this. And that was kind of how it came into fruition.

As a creator, and I would be interested to hear about horror specifically, who or what are your primary influences, in terms of films or filmmakers or anything else.

I don’t know, it’s always a really difficult thing to label any films or filmmakers particularly, because the way I do horror is a little bit different, it’s not a very traditional way of—I mean, I don’t really have jump scares, I don’t really intend to scare the audience, that’s not my main goal with me working in this genre. So definitely the influences come from real folk tales, real people’s experiences. I really love that people have such a strong belief in the spirit world in this region, and I think that’s what I find interesting, and that it’s very real here. It’s all around us, there are so many superstitions, there are so many things to think about that we don’t see or hear, it’s very spiritual in that sense, and I think that influences me a lot in the storytelling because I feel like I’m a piece of lead when I’m here; everyone’s always like “did you see that? Did you feel that? I felt something.” And I’m always the one that’s like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And I think that’s what influences me, I want to tell those stories because my friends see it, my family, they all feel creepy or eerie about things, and I’m always the one that doesn’t see it. So I guess I make those stories for myself to see it onscreen maybe? [Laughs] I don’t know.

Well, since you’ve touched on your filmmaking style and your lack of conventional horror tropes, I’m very interested to hear about whether, in particular in It’s Easier to Raise Cattle and Vinegar Baths, I feel like there’s a lot of affection toward the monster figures. Would you say that your films revise or reimagine horror tropes and monsters?

Yeah, absolutely. If you want to say it in that way, yeah, every time I pitch my films or ideas, the hero is always—or protagonist—is the monster, and it’s someone that I want the audience to love, I want the audience to support, I want the audience to just fall in love with that character. And I think that part of it comes because, how I said like when I came back from the UK and I was in Malaysia and I felt like such an outsider, I felt like one of those monsters. I had a different upbringing, I spoke differently, and so I felt so different and so outside my country and such a foreigner, and at that time I was like, oh wait, I kind of relate to these monster figures, where everyone was always like, who are you, why do you behave that way, why do you speak that way? So, I don’t know, that could be it, why I fell in love with these characters.

Yeah, that makes sense, I think feeling like an outsider really makes you empathize with the monster. I think that explains a lot of horror fans. [Laughs] So, following the screening that you attended of your film It’s Easier to Raise Cattle at [the University of Pittsburgh] a few weeks ago, you described the experience of finding the shooting location and the process of filming in Malaysia. I’d love it if you’d repeat that story for us, because I thought it was a very fascinating look into what it’s like to film in Malaysia in general, but specifically a horror film.

Okay. I can’t particularly remember exactly what I said, but I will try…

It was about the tree, I remember, finding the tree…

Yeah! Yeah, okay. So, I could start with the fact that when we shoot, of course we have to get permissions to shoot in certain locations and, like even in the jungle, of course someone owns a piece of land that you have to get permission for. And so, particularly for this film, and actually we do do this for a lot of films—depends on the producer, actually [laughs]. Most of the time we do do this. My producer at the time, she went to the land and got permissions for all the locations that we picked and chose and wherever we fell in love with. And then she told me that she was going to go and get permissions again, so I was like, “oh, I thought we had the yes to go ahead.” And she said, “oh no, I have to get spiritual permission.” And so she went back to the same locations and spoke to the spirit of the land or whoever was spiritually in charge of the land, and most of them said yes. In fact, all of them said yes apart from this tree that we wanted, which is kind of a big character in the film itself. And so she called me back and she was really worried, she was actually really terrified, and she was saying the tree spoke to her, it was a man, he was Malay, he was speaking to her in Malay, and he was saying “don’t shoot here. I don’t want you to shoot here.” And of course, me being the director, I want my tree though. That tree is perfect!

And so what we did was, we did a test shoot there, and of course we had a lot of rituals, like we weren’t allowed to eat any meat on the days that we were shooting there, we had loads of things, like dangle shiny CDs so that spirits would be distracted by the CDs blowing in the wind, and even when I was working with my actress, she was talking to the tree, kind of telling him that he’s her acting partner, he’s going to be in this film. So that’s really how we work sometimes when we work in film. And even now, when I’m doing pre-production for my feature film, a lot of it is set in the jungle, and even my actors have come up to me and said before they step on location they need to have this word to the land and to the spirits or whatever is there, just say like, “hi, we’re here to use this space, we’re not here to cause any harm.” It’s just like having a conversation with the spirit world. And even for me, when we shoot in the wild, I make sure that the crew—well, no one pees in the jungle, no one defecates there, we have proper shuttles to take us to toilets. Because, you know, that tree is somebody, that land is someone, and so you can’t just walk all over the place and pretend that you own it. So yeah, that’s generally how we work in Malaysia. Well, some people do. I do, anyway.

I think that people working in—creators, filmmakers, actors, I think they’re fairly superstitious all over.

Yeah actually, it’s true. And theatre as well is so superstitious. In Malaysia, because we have, kind of, multicultural, people have loads of religions, sometimes we even—before every film shoot, there’s always a prayer session, and sometimes we have to cover all bases and cover all religions so we’ll get each member. Like, someone—we nominate someone to say some prayers before we get ready to shoot. Just in case, I mean, making films is dangerous sometimes. And also, when you’re working with something like nature, it’s something that we need to respect as well. I can’t have all the games of my film and step all over places that don’t belong to me. So it’s this weird thing that at least I think we have here.

I’m definitely on board with that. I think it’s good to be respectful of the land you’re using and also the people you’re working with, to make them feel at ease. So this is not a question about horror specifically, but more about… you also mentioned that there’s a fairly tight-knit group of emerging and established Southeast Asian filmmakers, and I’d love to hear about that community and the kinds of projects you’re aware of emerging from there, horror and otherwise.

Well, I think in Southeast Asia, there is a lot of really interesting things coming up. What’s funny is that it was all meant to explode and then the pandemic happened. It’s weird because some of us were ready to release our films last year and then they held back so I don’t know what’s happening coming up this year or next year. And then a lot of us had to postpone all our shoots, so we’re all kind of shooting at the same time. So it’s really competitive of course, because we’re all fighting for the same things, but what I love is that we’re all friends and kind of keeping in touch all the time. In terms of what is coming out though, I think there isn’t anything particular with genre. Especially horror in Southeast Asia, it is very saturated, it’s an incredibly saturated market. Southeast Asians love horror, and I’m talking about the more traditional, commercial horror films. And so when you go in the more art-house circuit, I don’t think a lot of people like to play with horror, because it’s everywhere, but I like to do it [laughs]. But there is something very interesting in Malaysia, there is a production house called Kuman Pictures, and they are purely focusing on horror. They have this manifesto where they’re creating low-budget horrors kind of how it was made in the 70s, where it’s super low-budget, super quick shoots, everything is really about the strength of the story and the craziness of the filmmaker. And I think that’s quite interesting, so they’re doing quite cool stuff right now.

That’s awesome. Do you know if that manifesto has been translated into English?

It is. I think you can find it on their website or Facebook. So they’ve released three films, and you know how in Malaysia we have three predominant races, which is Malay, Chinese, and Indian, so they’ve released a film in each language and got a filmmaker from each group to make a film. I particularly like the one in Malay called Roh. That one’s very good.

Great, thanks! I’ll check them out for sure. Bouncing back to the monsters, because I can’t get away from them. Outside of Malaysia and Southeast Asia, the figures of the Penanggalan and Pontianak, which your previous two films dealt with, may not be very familiar to a lot of people. Would you be able to describe these monsters briefly and tell us what attracted you about these particular folkloric figures in your films?

Okay, I’ll start with the Pontianak, because I think she’s the Britney Spears of monsters here. [Laughs] She is iconic, maybe the most famous monster we have in this region, especially in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. And I love her story because in general she, in her human form, she was always this kind of wronged woman. It can get as violent as she was a raped woman, and she dies at childbirth. I’m digressing, but in old folk tales, there’s always this fear of women and childbirth, like pregnant women dying. I think there’s a fear of the power that women have, in terms of giving life and also death. So the terrifying thing is when a woman is bearing life and there’s death involved and I think that creates all these sorts of spirits and folk tales and the Pontianak is one of them. And so her story is that after she dies during childbirth, she comes back. She lives in a banana tree, I’m not sure why. It’s just one of those things.

But she’s really interesting because if you find a lone woman at night, especially men, you find this really beautiful, really hot, gorgeous, seductive woman looking for help, you should run away because she’s a Pontianak and she’s going to eat you, eat your guts or devour you. So I find that really a funny character because she’s so beautiful and socially, everyone’s like wow I’m so enticed by her but she’ll eat you, you know, be afraid of this one lone woman walking alone at night, because women shouldn’t be walking alone at night. So all of these things kind of like, put together make me fall in love with the Pontianak, and I think that she’s incredibly powerful. Oh also, when she eats you she turns really hideous, she has big claws and big teeth and she’s really scary. And actually, there’s a smell with her, so like if you smell this very sweet scent of, I can’t remember what the flowers are, but these white flowers, and they have this really strong, sweet scent. If you smell that, that means she’s very, very near. And if you don’t smell that, and you smell this stench of trash, that means she’s kind of far, so you’re safe, but when you have this sweet smell, so sometimes even at night, like say you’re just chilling with your friends outside and you have this very sweet scent of flowers, people start freaking out and they have to go inside, they’re like, “no, you’ve got to go in, there’s something weird outside.” That’s the Pontianak.

And then the Penanggalan, who is not as famous but she’s more well-known across the region of Southeast Asia, there’s many versions of her in different names, like there’s a Balinese version, there’s a Thai version, there’s Philippines, there’s a Laotian version. She’s everywhere. But we call it Penanggalan in west Malaysia. That’s a woman who functions in the daytime as a normal person, and then at night she flies out of her body, so her head separates from her body and the only thing attached is her dangling entrails. And so she’s flying with these entrails dangling around, she leaves the body hidden because apparently if you hide the body and she can’t find it, that’s how you kill her. But anyway, as she flies around, her thing is that she likes to eat fetuses, so a lot of pregnant women are afraid of her, also young babies she likes to eat as well. And how she came about, there’s many stories about how she came about, but a lot of people say that it’s to do with black magic, it’s a woman who’s sold her soul to the devil and that’s the curse that she’s had. But again, it’s another interesting character for me because it’s this very graphic idea of a woman separating herself from her body, and I think that is so relatable to a lot of women even today. So that was another character that I wanted to play with. I talked a lot about that because I love them, but there’s loads of things about these monsters that I think are very interesting.

No, that’s great, and it makes you think about how a lot of the films that get exported from Asia have to do with ghosts. You don’t see a lot of body horror coming out of Asia, at least not in the US. You know, maybe some from Japan, but mostly it’s ghostly figures. And so, I’m curious to hear about why body horror for you, and also what other folkloric figures from Malaysia specifically or Southeast Asia would you like to bring to the screen?

So let’s start with the body horror part. I think because the way I tell the stories, it does come from somewhere really personal, and I always have this mantra of trust your gut, which is part of my body, and so I do tend to use my body to tell stories. I don’t know, it sounds really abstract, but it’s all how it works, even when I write scripts I think about my body, I think about my fears of my body, I think about how my friends fear their bodies. And I think that’s something really interesting for me, at least growing up and my problems with how bodies are dealt with. Not just your own personal fear of your bodies, but also the ownership of your body from society and how your body is not your own, even in America there’s problems with abortion. That whole idea of just body, and who owns your body, or the horrors of the body is so old in terms of storytelling, and like how I told you in the folklore sense, a pregnant woman, that’s very much to do with the power of her body and the fears of that body. I think for me it was just a really natural way to tell these stories. I think the body has so much storytelling in it anyway, let alone everything else. So I’m starting at somewhere which maybe is just one thing, which is a body, but I think there’s a thousand and one stories you can talk about with the body. So that’s why I’m really interested in working within body horror.

And then the second question was any other folkloric figures… oh, there’s loads I’d like to bring on screen! I mean, a lot of them have been on screen in Malaysia already, but particularly, I really want to bring this one character called Hantu Tetek. She’s really interesting, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her on screen, I think she might have appeared in some comedies before. But she’s a grandma who has really giant breasts, like really giant, like huge. Like when you see drawings of her, half her body are just breasts. And they just kind of hang out there. And the tale is for parents to tell kids to come home before sundown, because if you’re still playing outside, this old lady will grab you and smother you to death with her breasts. And I really want to make a story about that. [Laughs] So that’s something that I’d like to make a short film at least about her, I think that would be quite fun. But aside from that, I would love to work on loads of other folk characters. There’s one particular one called Orang Minyak, which I find really interesting, he’s called oily man, so it’s usually a guy, and there’s a lot of really dark connotations about him, because he’s covered in oil, so he’s dark in color, and everyone’s terrified of him in the village. He’s known to be a rapist, he’s known to be a peeping tom, and these are all folk tales about him, so I think there’s a lot to unpack in that one horror folklore figure. And then there’s another one that I find really funny as well, which is called the Toyol, and that’s a little dead baby that’s been brought to life and they do all of your bidding. Yeah, there’s a lot of really fun characters, I think, they’re kind of weird and grotesque and absurd a bit, but I think that’s a nice colorful part of our folk tales here in this region.

I agree. And it’s fascinating to hear how all over the world, folk tales and superstitions and these kinds of monstrous figures are really intended to keep people in check. I think I heard something about, I don’t know if it was in Malaysia, but somebody dressed up as a Pontianak to scare people back into their homes during the Covid lockdown.

Yeah! Was it here? I can’t remember, either here or Indonesia. But yeah, they were dressing up as Pontianaks to make them go home [laughs]. I love it!

Yeah, I did too. I thought it was great. That’s awesome. Okay, I just have one final question for you, and that’s about your current project and any dream projects, you’ve touched on that already, but if you’re able to talk about it, I’d love to hear about your feature film and what else you’re cooking up.

Yeah, I mean right now it’s really deep into the feature film, we’re hoping to shoot in July this year. Let’s see. Let’s see what the pandemic says! But you know, we’re still planning to do that. I’m deep into pre-production now, so a lot of rehearsals and everything. The film, at the moment it’s called Tiger Stripes, we haven’t got a Malay title for it yet, and it’s about this young girl, she’s twelve and she reaches puberty so she gets her period for the first time, and things start to change when her body starts to change. She eventually turns into something that she’s really terrified of, her friends are really terrified of, her whole community are super terrified of, and it’s all about what she chooses to do, and whether she chooses to embrace who she really is or keep hiding for the rest of her life. So that’s what it is in a nutshell, it’s kind of a coming-of-age body horror to do with tigers. Tigers and jungle things and lots of teen angst. [Laughs]

Sounds like a lot of fun, and I’m really looking forward to it. I hope it goes well—I’ve got my fingers crossed for you.

I know. Well, we’ll get there. But in terms of other things, this is what I’m focusing on at the moment, of course I mentioned that I want to make a film about Hantu Tetek. I guess, what else is there, yeah, I have lots of small ideas. Maybe something to do with genetics, and family, genes being passed down. I’d like to do a Chinese film, because I’m ethnically Chinese and I come from this line of very traditional Chinese roots and Chinese culture, and then there’s this idea of blood is thicker than water. So I want to play with some kind of—there’s definitely something horrific about all this family stuff. That’s something I’m kind of working on, hopefully it will come up, but that will take awhile. Let’s concentrate on Tiger Stripes first.

Yeah, first things first, but that sounds great. Sounds really awesome, I’m looking forward to it! Well, thank you so much, this was amazing, I really enjoyed hearing about your work. I really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me!

Bibliography of Further Reading

“Amanda Nell Eu Loves Monsters.” The World of Apu, 10 September 2019.

Chee, Eisabess. “What My Mother Taught Me About the Loneliness of Being a Woman.” Rice Media, 2020.

Galt, Rosalind. Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization. Columbia University Press, October 2021.

Leah, Nea. “10 Questions with Filmmaker Amanda Nell Eu.” Juice Online, 18 September 2017.

“Tea Time with Lagi Senang Jaga Sekandang Lembu [It’s Easier to Raise Cattle].” Interview for Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, 1 February 2018.

About the Interviewer

Sonia Lupher is a Visiting Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where she completed her PhD with a dissertation on the ties between women’s horror filmmaking, women’s genres, and the history of women’s cinema. Follow her on Twitter @SoniaLupher or @cutthroatwomen.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.