The Queen of Black Magic (2019)

Original title: Ratu Ilmu Hitam

A group of people who grew up together in a country orphanage, and grew as close as birth family there, mostly coupling up with their foster siblings, too, gathers back there to say a last goodbye to the apparently beloved orphanage boss Bandi (Yayu Unru). The new batch of kids is away on a bus tour over the weekend, so it seems like a good time for a reunion.

And a reunion it certainly is: the dark secrets haunting the lives of the grown-up orphans come back in a more literally form of haunting, and soon, ghosts and ghoulies appear, and half of the cast loses their minds in various very unpleasant ways. A nested series of dark secrets is revealed, and sins of the past have to be paid off in gory and very unappetizing ways.

Kimo Stamboel’s Queen of Black Magic (written by the redoubtable Joko Anwar) is only nominally a remake of the classic Suzzanna vehicle, using some elements of the older film but really being its own thing, the nostalgia relegated to the end credits. Hilariously enough, part of that nostalgia is a still shot of a bowl of maggots and worms, but then, once you’ve gotten through the scenes of centipede horror the film at hand features (enough of it you might also sell it as a remake of Centipede Horror), you might feel nostalgic towards that bowl too.

But really, centipedes, (self-)mutilation and all kinds of increasingly insane gory fun (and “fun) until the climax goes for a veritable hell on Earth of the grotesque are quite a ways away when the movie starts. Stamboel spends the first half of the running time carefully establishing character relations and those parts of their shared past the characters admit to, even among each other, effectively suggesting the holes in their stories and the peculiarities in their behaviours without outright explaining them or pointing them out.

So when the supernatural violence begins to explode, it’s really a very traditional, as well as as very effective way to confront the characters with the lies and secrets of their pasts while drenching them in blood and bodily fluids. It’s not one of those highly moralizing films where nasty people get what they deserve, though. Rather, there are degrees to everyone’s guilt, Stamboel making pretty clear that, as terrible as some of the things some of the characters did were, there were quite a few extenuating circumstances, and the traumas inflicted on them in their childhoods were price enough for anyone to pay for any sin. Behind the gore, there’s some clear knowledge of the way abuse can twist its victims into accomplices of their abusers, leaving behind minefields of guilt, and silent quotidian horrors.

And it’s not as if the supernatural vengeance were in any way, shape or form interested in punishing anyone in appropriate ways. Indeed, the film makes a point of the perpetrator of the vengeance being so warped by their own pain and trauma, she simply doesn’t care if she hurt or kills innocents not even born when the initial incidents took place; it’s not so much about vengeance anymore, but a wish to perpetuate the pain inflicted on oneself. Again, Stamboel works quite a few truths about the true horrors of abuse into his little fest of nasty visuals. In fact, one might argue that all the blood, mutilation, child death and centipedes are Stamboel’s way to ease the bitter pills about abuse he has to offer down our throats a bit more easily, the icky bits actually making it possible to watch what amounts to a tragedy about cycles of abuse.

Headshot (2016)

A man (Iko Uwais) with a headshot wound is washed ashore in a small Indonesian fishing town. Young doctor Ailin (Chelsea Islan), manning the place’s small clinic for a time, manages to save his life, and clearly develops a bit of a thing for him while he’s still in a coma. Because she’s reading “Moby Dick” at the time (she’s clearly a woman of excellent taste), she privately dubs the guy Ishmael. That name is going to stick once he wakes up, for he has only the faintest traces of memories of his past, so Ishmael he is now.

Of course, people do not find themselves getting shot in the head without a reason, and his past is going to catch up to him rather sooner than later. And because movie bad guys are cruel like that, Ailin and a random little girl are going to be dragged into his affairs rather more than anyone deserves; and Ishmael will learn that he’d probably rather have not remembered what the people from his past coming for him drag back to the surface again.

It’s really interesting to compare the joint Kimo Stamboel/Timo Tjahjanto feature Headshot with Tjahjanto’s directorial solo outing The Night Comes for Us. Both, once they get going, are action films of relentless pace, each of which contains about as much set-piece violence as two normal action films. As a matter of fact, you could argue that there’s a bit too much crushing of heads, shooting of bodies and so on and so forth, going on here, the directors clearly working from the theory that when one action scene is great, two must be even better. It’s a bit exhausting to watch at times, to be frank, but on the other hand, every single action scene (again in both films), is so inventive, so excellently staged, and so over the top in its violence, one can hardly blame a director for not leaving any one out. As a viewer, one simply needs to be prepared to be overwhelmed.

The films also share their tendency to be over-the-top gory, with so much blood and other bodily fluids bathing the surviving characters, the classic Japanese blood fountain seems rather reserved in comparison. Again, it might get a bit much for some viewers, but when you go in prepared for excess, you’ll have a great time simply mumbling “did they really just do that?”.

Headshot’s action is a bit different in nature than that of The Night, though, for where the later, Stamboel-less film is an action movie with martial arts sequences, this one’s very much a martial arts movie that puts most of its thoughts into coming up with new ways of getting two or a dozen people killed by Iko Uwais’s fists and feet. So there are quite a few moments echoing classic martial arts cinema, like the scene where Uwais has to fight off his attackers in a police station while handcuffed to a desk. The film also consistently sets Uwais against actors who are just as great screen fighters as he is, so there’s never a moment where we get the Indonesian version of having to pretend Keanu Reeves could beat Mark Dacascos in a martial arts fight. Now, if it where a contest in waving one’s arms around…But I digress.

The other big difference between the two films is in the nature of their protagonists. As Joe Taslim’s Ito in the later film, Ishmael has done terrible things, but where Taslim chose a life as a gangster and did have some, if dubious, degree of choice in his life (even though he tries to become a full human being eventually), Headshot’s protagonist is the victim of a man who kidnaps children, brainwashes them, and uses them as weapons, making him sympathetic even in his most violent moments. The film does use this quite cleverly to keep the audience’s sympathy on Ishmael’s side, emphasising the horror of his upbringing, the irony of him now using what has been taught to him to bring his “father” down, as well as the tragedy that the people he’s killing throughout the film – they don’t leave him much of a choice, mind you – are the closest he ever had to a family and loved ones.


It’s actually rather more cleverly done than you’d expect in a film that’s quite this fond of outrageous violence, but I for one am not going to complain about a film giving me the violence as well as some hidden complexities.

In short: DreadOut (2019)

A bunch of teens really feel the need to improve their social media standing. Their plan of attack involves going to an empty, supposedly haunted apartment building somewhere in what I assume to be Jakarta to film themselves there encountering fake ghosts. They do need the help of sensible, lower class classmate Linda (Caitlin Halderman) who knows the security guard to get in, though, so she’s co-opted by the guy she clearly has a crush on, too, and we have our mandatory heroine who might be somewhat closer connected to the building than she knows herself.

Of course, the teens encounter rather more serious supernatural activity in the building than they would have wished for.

The Indonesian DreadOut, directed by Kimo Stamboel (once one half of the Mo Brothers), is based on the videogame of the same title. I haven’t played that one myself, so I can’t talk to how close the film is to the game, but I believe the repeated use of cellphone flashes as a weapon against the film’s monsters is taken right from the game – and isn’t terribly convincing on screen, I have to say.

On the other hand, even though the film as a whole keeps inside the lines of horror as a carnival ride, Stamboel is a perfectly talented barker, so most of the horror sequences are well-timed and much improved in their effectiveness by some pretty cool monster design. Pocong and other creatures of Indonesian folklore pop up, and those are of course creepy as hell when done right. Going by the director’s past, I would have expected a bit more blood and gore and a higher body count, but I don’t exactly need more dead teenagers in it to enjoy a film (though your mileage may vary, of course).


The film also puts some effort into creating the proper creepy mood, with set design that gets a lot of decrepit atmosphere out of a miniscule budget. And while the script isn’t exactly deep, it does make good use of the couple of locations it has to work with, and does know how to make the most out of the film’s weirder ideas, like the impossible circular, bottomless pool of water on the sixth floor of an apartment building that is a gate to somewhere else. What more could I ask of a videogame movie?