Director: Sisworo Gautama Putra
Year: 1980
Country: Indonesia
Rating: 7.0
Was this produced by the Islamic Brotherhood?
It almost had me kneeling and praying towards Mecca at the end. Allahu Akbar.
The reputation of this Indonesian cult horror film is perhaps overblown,
but it is still good fun with a solid portion of creepiness and imagery.
But it isn't nearly as gory as I had expected - more atmospheric with creaking
sounds, piano playing in the night, ghostly images, graveyards and the living
dead. It borrows a lot of the horror tropes from the West but setting it
in an Islamic nation gives it a fresh feel.
It begins with the morbid burial of the
mother of a family. Her husband, son and daughter mourn her passing. The
burial is a simple ceremony - dig a hole, place the body in white sheets,
put wooden planks around the body and fill the hole. Some Indonesian burials
can be very elaborate and one gruesome custom for some ethnic groups is to
dig up the body every few years to clean it and dress it in new clothes.
Kind of sweet. This is called Ma'nene. That this ceremony is very basic reveals
a lot about the family. They are very westernized with little regard for
superstition or religion. The daughter wears short skirts, goes discoing
and smokes. The father refuses to believe in anything that hints at the mystical.
The teenage son seems lost with the mother's death. He goes to a fortune
teller who tells him he is in darkness. And needs black magic to protect
him.
With the mother dead, they hire a housekeeper
who happens to look like the fortune teller and has a stone cold death mask
of a face. Shit starts happening. The son is the first to see the mother
floating outside his window, beckoning him to come. There are a few unexpected
deaths around the family. A shaman is hired to rid the house of evil spirits,
but when all hell breaks out, the father still calls it all nonsense. Then
the zombies come for them. Do you believe now? The zombies are traditionally
slow but still scary, digging up the mother's body is a jolt, the housekeeper
from Hell has a habit of visiting graveyards at night - but Allah saves the
day and the daughter starts wearing a hijab. Allahu Akbar.
