Why Indonesia’s horror films are booming
Summary
- Directors such as Joko Anwar are taking old ghost stories to new heights
JOKO ANWAR had a bleak childhood growing up in a slum in North Sumatra in Indonesia. “I was worried I might get kidnapped by Wewe Gombel," he says, referring to a female ghost in Javanese mythology known for abducting children. But Mr Anwar’s childhood tribulations helped him cultivate a career as a director of horror films. His breakthrough came in 2017 with “Pengabdi Setan" (“Satan’s Slaves"), about a family haunted by the death of their mother. His most recent blockbuster “Siksa Kubur" (“Grave Torture"), about two siblings whose parents are killed in a suicide-bombing, was released in April. And a recent Netflix series, “Joko Anwar’s Nightmares and Daydreams", released in June, became the first Indonesian series to make the top ten shows in America.
Mr Anwar’s work is part of a broader trend. The number of Indonesian horror movies produced in a year has surged from fewer than five in the 1990s to over 40 by 2018. After a brief decline during covid-19, the industry has picked up; 50 horror films were produced in 2023 (see chart). One of these, “KKN di Desa Penari"—based on a viral thread on X, about a purportedly real experience of students in a spooky village—became the highest-grossing film in the country, taking $25m at the box office and selling 10m tickets since its release in 2022. That year, nine of the 15 best-selling Indonesian films were horror.
Why is Indonesia such a horror-movie powerhouse? It is partly down to the country’s rich folklore. “We live very close to these things in our daily lives," says Ekky Imanjaya, a film specialist at Binus University in Jakarta, the capital. Parents often use ghost stories to make children behave.
Meanwhile, the roots of the recent horror boom can be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s. During the so-called New Order regime of the dictator Suharto (who was in power from 1967 to 1998) film-makers churned out lurid exploitation films. Under the scrutiny of censors, horror films during this period usually had an “ideological dimension", says Thomas Barker of the Australian National University. A typical storyline involves a woman who turns into a vengeful spirit, until she is tamed by a pious Muslim man: a popular trope for the Muslim-majority country.
Film production almost died out in the 1990s during a recession, but it came back in the 2000s. A new generation of film-makers emerged, partly inspired by Japanese and Thai horror. The rise of streaming in the past decade or so has helped usher in the new era, too. Horror fans overly familiar with the usual tropes and Christian themes in Western films enjoy Indonesia’s alternative motifs and Islam-based storylines, says David Gregory of Severin Films, an American distribution firm.
Some Indonesians reckon the local elements of its horror might be too impenetrable for foreigners. Satrya Wibawa, a cultural attaché at the Indonesian embassy in Singapore, cites the pocong undead who jump around because their bodies are tied up as part of local burial customs: will they really scare Western viewers? Mr Anwar is more hopeful. He points to the recent success of South Korean cinema as a “perfect example" of how films could be “accessible for a global audience" while retaining their country’s identity.
