‘New Monster Types’: Rise of Southeast Asian Horror Movies Art and Culture News

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – The premiere of Netflix and Disney + Hotstar’s Roh (Malay “soul”), a supernatural horror film and the first feature film by Malaysian director Emir Ezwan, is another international achievement for a new wave of low-budget horror work. In Southeast Asia.

He debuted worldwide on June 1 when Roh was shot in two weeks in the Dengkil forest south of Kuala Lumpur, with a budget of RM 360,000 ($ 88,500). Flash made its debut on Malaysian and Singapore cinema screens in August 2020, before a new wave of COVID-19 infection closed theaters.

Roh was first introduced to world cinema radar by the National Film Development Corporation Malaysia (FINAS) at the 93rd Oscar Awards in April, as it was unlikely to represent the country that premiered in the International Feature Film category.

Despite winning nominations for festivals in the United States, Italy, Singapore and Indonesia, Roh has not been included in the long list of Oscars. But it has joined the list of films inspired by the nightmares of Southeast Asia, which are becoming the leader of players and horror fans in the sector around the world and are recognized by the region’s popular film industry.

Conventional demons

Roh is an amazing story about demonic property set in the margins of a tropical forest during the war. A broken family takes a strange girl drenched in mud and blood into the house. When he finally speaks after days of horrible silence, his dreadful curse will mark the beginning of his descent into a literal hell.

The film stands out from the package, thanks to a mix of Islamic folklore and black Malay magic, atmospheric jungle and Malaysian costumes from the old world. Edgar Wright, the British director of the famous 2004 film Shaun of the Dead, was praised by Roh in March as an “amazing thing” on Twitter.

“The Netflix deal (with the exception of North America worldwide) was created thanks to our sales agent, TBA Studios located in the Philippines, which this year replaced Roh in the European film market,” said Amir Muhammad, an independent pulp fiction publisher and English, film director and Kuala Lumpur the CEO of Kuman Films, based in Al Jazeera.

Roh is the second and most successful film from the production house, including James Lee’s Two Sisters (2019) in psychological horror and Prem Nath’s Irul: Ghost Hotel (2021). Irul is “the first horror film of its kind” found in Southeast Asia and Tamil around the world.

Amir is pleased to see how viewers around the world will react to Roh. “We never expected it, but Spanish and Portuguese filmmakers have already tweeted quite a bit about it,” he told Al Jazeera.

Blood innovations

Thomas Barker, professor of film and television at the University of Malaysia in Nottingham, near Kuala Lumpur and author of Indonesian cinema, says New Order: Going Mainstream, “Southeast Asian filmmakers are innovating in a somewhat obsolete genre in the West,” with well-known tropes, stories and monsters. he told Al Jazeera.

Supernatural folklore has long inspired generations of Southeast Asian writers, directors, and artists, and ghost stories are a well-established genre that have become bestsellers and blockbusters.

Some of the most popular monsters, derived from the old animist beliefs created by Hindu-Buddhist cosmology and later Islam, include the ” pontians’ – known in Indonesian as the “cuntilans” – a carnivorous creature. she is often depicted as a pregnant woman in labor and a beautiful young woman who likes blood.

Then “toyol,” a dead gremlin-like baby, shamans can call on to help in black magic rituals, and in Malaysia, a “orang minyak” (“fat man”) a humanoid creature covered in slippery black fat. who kidnaps and rapes young women. The freak is perhaps the “penanggal,” the head of the female vampire, with organs still attached to the severed neck, flying behind the menstrual blood at night.

Barker believes that companies like Netflix, HBO and Disney + are increasingly looking for more competitive content to attract regional audiences and that films and TV series they can produce from countries like Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines are also attractive because they are cheaper than similar European or Australian productions.

“Streaming platforms became a huge market around the world, everyone could access any film in any country, even Indonesian ones, and I can only appreciate that,” Game Director Anwar, one of the main characters of Indonesia’s new horror wave, Al Jazeera said. The 2017 film Pengabdi Setan (Slaves of Satan), a loose remake of the 1980 classic of the same name by Sisworo Gautama Putra, is the most-won horror film of all time in Indonesia and has spread critical acclaim in 42 countries.

Riding in global waves

Satan’s slaves aroused international curiosity about Indonesian horror films that have no budget for South Korea’s most popular productions and have often been dismissed as derivative and rude.

Game Anwar (right) in the set of slaves of Satan [Courtesy of Joko Anwar]

But international horror fans, who miss the classic European and North American horrors of the late 1970s and 1980s, praise Southeast Asian films for their similar craftsmanship (fast and cheap) and top-notch. Their unfamiliar characters and original settings that exploit the rich and unknown juicy folklore of the region add a breath of fresh air to the saturated horror world of the film industry.

The game’s latest film, Perempuan by Tanah Jahanam (internationally renamed Impetigore), won 17 nominations and six at the major Indonesian film festival, the Citra Awards, before being screened at the US Sundance Festival. It was nominated as Indonesia’s official presentation for this year’s Oscars and was named one of the best international films of 2020 by Bloody Disgusting.

In response to this success, Shudder, the giant streaming of the US fear of Impetigore, distributed the digital platform of the AMC film chain. Indonesian horror films that have also entered the US market are Queen of Black Magic (Ratu Ilmu Hitam, 2019, a remake of the 1981 Indonesian cult film Liliek Sudjio), directed and written by Kimo Stamboel, and Devil Take You Too by May Timo Tjahjanto. by the hand of.

Timo will soon direct a blockbuster of the 2016 Korean zombie apocalypse train for the Hollywood New Line Cinema in Busanera with screenwriter Gary Dauberman of the famous Annabelle trilogy. “Working with a great horror writer makes me very excited. Compared to the original Train Busan with a ballet, this will be a tough mosh pit dance, ”Timok told Al Jazeera.

Timo is surprised by Indonesia’s horror success, but also believes that the industry isn’t moving fast enough and has a long way to go to overcome “the huge magic wave of Korean cinema that people like me can admire with fear”.

COVID-19 has also hit the local film industry hard at a time when things were improving, Timo says. “I’m realistic and I love fans and enthusiasm, but I feel like sometimes we have to look beyond advertising and realize that we still don’t do our best.”

Localized scares

For Thomas Barker, locating plots and settings is key to the success of the genre. “Taking advantage of local folklore and experiences, but deeply aware of the global horror genre, filmmakers bring new ideas, including new types of monsters and monsters,” he told Al Jazeera.

One example is the Impetigore of the Game, which tells the story of Maya played by Tara Basro, a young and poor woman from Jakarta who decides to return to the village of her ancestor Harjosa, after whom she senses that the family is a hidden treasure. He soon learns that his father’s legacy is much more morbid – not only from Indonesian ghost folklore, but also from local cultural traditions such as “wayang kulit” (Javanese shadow puppets).

“It’s not an opportunity, it comes naturally,” Games said. “I started reading and telling this kind of folklore all the time. It is also taught in Indonesian school books. “

Belaban Hidup – another low-budget horror film directed by Ray Lee’s Infection Zombie (2021), transformed Dayak’s unique culture – East Malaysia and Indonesia’s Kalimantan on the island of Borneo, known for being former headhunters. the world’s first zombie movie in a Dayak tribal setting. Dayak is a term for indigenous peoples, including Iban and Bidayuh.

Belaban Hidup tells the story of a secret organization that moves from Madagascar to Borneo to create a fake clinic and continue experimenting with humans. When a group of orphaned prisoners finds a way to escape, they release a horde of meat-eating zombies into the surrounding jungle, involving the resident tribe in battle. “My film Dayak wants to promote culture, language and residence in the world,” Leek told Al Jazeera.

The theme was instrumental in winning 13 awards at film festivals in Singapore and Canada. The most recent were the International Horror Film Festival in Russia and the Asian Film Awards in the Philippines.

A photo of Roh. The film is set in the Malaysian forest and was shot in southern Kuala Lumpur [courtesy of Kuman Films]

“When people in West Malaysia still do not know the Dayak well, many international awards show their curiosity about the world to see its beautiful and unique culture.”

Belaban Hidup is still struggling to find an official Malaysian distributor and cinemas have been closed as part of the government’s latest “complete closure” in the COVID-19 cases.

But it looks like the future of fear in Southeast Asia will move forward thanks to the opportunities offered by international film streaming platforms.

“The release of the film this year will not be feasible because of the additional marketing costs and yet the standard operating procedures of the coronavirus that would limit the number of viewers,” Amir Muhammad told Al Jazeera. “It would be nice to go back to the big-screen premieres, but for at least our next two films, The Screaming Sky and Arrogance, we’re definitely only looking at streaming premieres.”