A Malay coming-of-age film about a girl who becomes a monster after her first period has been censored in its home country. It's part of a wider reluctance to show menstruation on screen. According to the movies, when a young girl gets her period, one of two things might typically happen: she turns into a monster, or she becomes an instant pariah.
Carrie (1976), Brian de Palma's adaptation of Stephen King's debut novel, famously begins with naked teenagers pummelling the protagonist with tampons, screaming "Plug it up! Plug it up!", after she is confused and scared by the arrival of her first period while in the communal showers at school. In Ginger Snaps (2000), goth teenager Ginger Fitzgerald's first period attracts the attention of a roaming wolf, whose bite prompts Ginger's transformation into a werewolf. Outside of horror, which has always trafficked in taboo, Judy Blume's novel Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, originally published in 1970, is known by Blume-heads as her "period book".
The book chronicles a teenager's anxiety about being the last one in her friend group to get her period, and has frequently been the subject of much ire and bans in schools and libraries in some US states for its frank depiction of menstruation. Pixar's Turning Red (2022) sees academic overachiever Meilin Lee turning into a giant red panda in moments of intense stress or emotion as a metaphor for puberty and menstruation. And now, in Amanda Nell Eu's debut film Tiger Stripes, which i.
