Adam Lowenstein, author of Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media:
Alluring Monsters delivers on all of its ambitious promises. Rosalind Galt elegantly balances the local and the global, the historical and the theoretical, the industrial and the aesthetic, the cultural and the political, the filmic and the related arts. The result is an important new model for imagining world cinema.

Alicia Izharuddin, author of Gender and Islam in Indonesian Cinema:
The first of its kind and a book like no other, Alluring Monsters brings Southeast Asian cinema and postcoloniality into productive tension through the much-beloved yet much-feared figure of the pontianak. Rosalind Galt has created thrilling new paths for thinking about postcolonial cinema, animism, feminism, queer/trans subjectivities, and decolonial politics.

Bliss Cua Lim, author of Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique:
Alluring Monsters is indispensable reading for those interested in how media, folklore, and anticolonial feminism might be explored together. The pontianak, a female ghost of childbirth with queer feminist appeal, is a fascinating fusion of pre-Islamic animism and postindependence aspirations; her influence on transnational vampire lore is decisive but little known. Galt’s deep dive into the political potential of the pontianak moves from colonial misconstruals of indigenous culture to late-colonial studio films and the decolonizing impulses of Malaysian and Singaporean popular cinemas. Across such multiethnic, intercultural flows, Galt explores issues of racialization, ethnonationalism, and environmentalism via an archivally rich exploration of supernatural horror in Southeast Asian and world cinemas.