The Maid (2005)

The Maid (2005) is a Singapore horror movie directed by Kelvin Tong, starring Hong Huifang, Chen Shucheng, Su Weiming and Philippine actress Alessandra De Rossi. The movie had choose "Hungry Ghost Festival" as the main setting and lead us to discover about the festival itself through the perspective of a foreigner, which is Rosa Dimaano. In this article, I am going to analyze The Maid by looking to the semantic and syntactic approach of the movie.

The movie start from Rose Dimaano (Alessandra De Rossi) leaves her hometown to be a maid in Singapore to support her sick brother back in Philippine. Her employers, Mr. Teo (Chen Shucheng) and Ms. Teo (Hong Huifang) treated her very well and their mentally retarded son, Ah Soon (Su Weiming) accepts her quickly. She arrived the country during Chinese seventh month which is also the "Hungry Ghost Month". During that time, the hell gates open and the spirit will walk among the living for 30 days. Due to her ignorance of the culture, Rosa accidently stepped on the ashes of burned paper money and offended the taboo of Hungry Ghost Month. Rosa soon realize she was haunted, as she started to see dead people around her. To keep her job, Rosa suffered in the fright and terror but soon she realizes there is a spirit in the house trying to communicate with her.

Horror film are designed to create terror and evoke hidden fear by showing the situation of human versus danger,uncertainty events such as ghost, monster or maniac killer.The semantic and syntactic of horror film can be easily recognized from the movie. The location of The Maid was usually the old house, the stage of Chinese Opera, and rooms with dim light. Religious ritual was highly connected to the supernatural events of the movie take place in the Seventh Month. The lighting in the film are usually dark and sometimes using blue and red lighting as the metaphor of hell.The movie used a lot of sound effects and background music to create jump-scare effect, for example, the scene when Rosa swept the ashes in front of the house and Ms. Teo yell over her.

The theme of the movie is the classic good vs evil. Rosa is the pure and innocent girl and Ms. and Mr. Teo is the evil who killed Esther after she being raped by Ah Soon. In the end, Rosa escape from Ms. and Mr. Teo attempt to murder her and brings back Esther remains body for a proper burial, while Ms. and Mr. Teo died in their own evil behaviors. Death usually happens in a horror movie. In The Maid, Rosa had witnessed a few death including little boy died in car accident, the foreign worker who jumped from the building after being possessed by a ghost, Esther who being burned alive and hidden in a Chinese drum, and almost got herself killed by Ms. and Mr. Teo after discovered Esther's death. After being terrorized by the haunted situation throughout the whole film, Rosa survived as the final girl in the movie.