The Geographies of Modern Indonesian Horror

From the beginnings of the modern wave of Indonesian horror films (with Jelangkung in 2001) onwards, there has been a remarkable consistency of themes of the division between the urban and the rural—a tendency that sets Indonesian horror films apart from others within Southeast Asia. In the case of Jelangkung, this division is narrativized as a group of young Jakarta ghost hunters travel into a rural area to investigate a local supernatural phenomenon—which ends up following them back to the city. In both Jelangkung and many of the films to follow, the journey between the city and the country is given marked weight in the narrative discourse: the locale is not suddenly shifted, but rather there is an emphasis on the steps required to make the transition (and thus on the alterity of the two realms). This split does not appear to signify in exactly the same way across the corpus of films, but it does, not surprisingly, align with a range of interrelated themes—among them, for example, the moral corruption of the city, the tendency to neglect local traditions, and the dangers of digging into the past.

This presentation will seek to take a broad view of this particular trope, tracing out a range of permutations of the motif in Indonesian horror cinema from 2001 to the present, in order to make the case that this particular feature—the urban-rural divide—can offer us an entrée into the distinctive signifying operations of the Indonesian horror film.