Satan's Slaves

Indonesia, 1981. A mother who was once a famous singer has been bedridden for three years; she cannot speak and only rings the bell at her bedside. After she dies, the bell keeps ringing. The house is far from the city with a graveyard beside it, and the father leaves for town because of debts. Four children and a grandmother are left behind. The subject is not the ghost but what the mother did. What she paid in order to have children emerges slowly, and the film takes its fear from that knowledge; the house is not possessed, it has been part of an agreement all along. The form is old-fashioned: dark corridors, long waits, sudden sound. There is almost no computer effect and the horror comes largely from sound design and empty frames. The production starts from the 1980 Indonesian film of the same name without repeating it; it tells what came before. Joko Anwar's film drew close to four and a half million viewers and became the country's most-watched domestic production that year; it took seven awards from thirteen nominations at the Indonesian Film Festival and played in more than forty countries. Tara Basro plays the eldest daughter and Bront Palarae the father. Who it is for: viewers who like slow-built haunted house horror and Southeast Asian cinema. Who it is not for: anyone with no tolerance for jump scares; the film works through sound and detonates often.