Academic literature on the topic 'Indonesian Horror Films'

Indonesian films experience development over time. In the beginning film in Indonesia served as a massmobilizer and propaganda, then suspended animation. Now Indonesian films are taken into account to internationalfestivals, especially the horror film genre. The object to be analyzed in this study is a horror film, entitled 'PengabdiSetan' by director Rudi Sudjarwo produced in 2017 which is also nominated for the Indonesian Film Festival. Researchthrough the analysis of historical studies with comparative research methods, literature study of two films that have beenadapted to the same genre, namely the horror genre. Both films have good unity in the story and cinematography, but inthe film “Pengabdi Setan” made in 2017 the audience is treated to a different cinematography than the one made in 1980and the many cinematographic developments in the Indonesian film horror genre.

Analysis and interpretation of the short stories by Indonesian female writer Intan Paramaditha (Intan Paramaditha, born in 1979) make it possible to understand that her writing occupies a special niche in the modern Indonesian literary paradigm. Paramaditha’s feminist texts are disguised as horror stories with settings in contemporary Indonesia. The article examines five short stories (“Spinner of Darkness” (Pemintal Kegelapan), “Vampire” (Vampir), “Polaroid’s Mystery” (Misteri Polaroid), “The Blind Woman without a Toe” (Perempuan Buta tanpa Ibu Jari), and “The Obsessive Twist” (Goyang Penasaran)). Using the intertextual method, it was possible to prove the gothic poetics of these literary works. The short stories contain the mosaic of folklore-mythological motives from the Malay Archipelago, Biblical and Quranic narratives, as well as European fairy tales and allusions to American horror fiction and horror films. Her prose is built upon some borrowed European literary forms for expression of authentic Indonesian content. The social themes are intertwined with feminist criticism that is presented as a Kitsch of the Indonesian mass culture. In “The Obsessive Twist” the main conflict is focused on the heated debates on sexuality, politics, violence, and religion. The feminist agenda of her prose is contrasted with the turn of contemporary Indonesia towards a Muslim patriarchal society. Paramaditha’s works represent a unique product of West-East-synthesis aimed not only at the Indonesian, but also the global audience.

During the former President Soeharto’s regime (or the New Order) in 1966-1998, films were vehicles for the creation of a national culture intended to implement its development policies and more generally its authoritarian rule. There were guidelines on what to say, what not to say and who could speak in which medium. Every film produced during the New Order, had a narrative structure that moved from order through disorder to a restoration of the order. However, since the fall of the New Order, there is a re-emergence of Javanese cultural identity (known as kejawen or kebatinan) through the second boom of Indonesia’s horror film in cinemas. As Mulder (2005) explained, the revival and vitality of ‘kebatinan’ mysticism in the immediate post-independence period can best be seen as a search for cultural expression and identity in a time of transition and change. One of the examples of Indonesia’s current horror film is Jelangkung (2001) which is based on a Javanese folklore, and has reawakened once again the overall Indonesia’s film industry that has been stagnant since the monetary crisis in 1996. This paper aims to find out how Indonesian horror films (2001-2008) more specifically: Jelangkung (2001), Kuntilanak (2006) and Titisan Naya (2008) have provided a significant means for the reassertion of Javanese cultural identity. It is a part or chapter of a bigger paper or dissertation that is still an ongoing process.

The paper about the Indonesian “zombie” pocong examines specific features of the ghost stories in Indonesia, tracks the etymology of the words hantu (“ghost,” “undead”) and pocong (“wrapped in shroud”), and includes a translation of a typical ghost story (“Pocong and a Cart Hawker”). It introduces the hitherto understudied material in Russia that counts only a small number of Indonesian and Anglophone works. The aims of this paper include collecting data about this mythological creature from Indonesian sources, studying the image of pocong and contemporary narratives about him, searching his closest parallels in the world folklore, and interpreting the meanings of the character discovered in modern Indonesian culture. For religious people, pocong is a symbol of the frailty of life. Some traditional Muslims in modern Indonesia practice pocong related rituals (“Pocong’s oath,” pesugihan). Nowadays, the image of pocong is demythologized as it circulates in urban flesh-mobs, pranks, and horror films. The typology of this scary image is surprisingly similar not to Muslim genies but to from Chinese hopping vampires. Modern zombie studies shed light on the genealogy of pocong as a walking dead. Todd K. Platts discusses the spectrum of potential underpinnings of the zombie that include racism, terrorism, class inequality, disintegration of a nuclear family, consumer culture etc that may be applied to pocong as well. Pocong symbolizes oppressed common folk and this image is frequently used in mass political protests. Interpretation of pocong as a marginalized figure is relevant for the folklore studies in Indonesia, as well as for the study of horror-discourse in general.

The film industry in Indonesia has been through ups and downs. As an industry, thus there are usual things the film creators done to take financial benefit from the film industry. Some researches show that messages brought by mass communication media is no more that political and economic efforts from media to get much more benefits. Therefore, it is acknowledged that Indonesian films lately put horror and mystic theme beneath in order to get closer with Indonesia culture as the consumers. However, it is issued when the mystic theme influenced along with pornography. Ethics development efforts and law enforcement must be the continuous material to discuss the problem solving.

This article discusses implicit moral messages in the Palasik film. This film is based on a myth from West Sumatra society as a creature invented by someone who is a Black magician looking to live long in the world. At night, while looking for food, Palasik let’s go of his head and floated in the air. Palasik food is a fetus that is in the womb of his mother. Stories like this make film creators unable to avoid the element of violence in visualization. As a result, many criticisms of this film consider it to be extreme, especially at the moment when Palasik is preying on a fetus in the womb and blood is splattered everywhere. Also, the visualization of explosions for women who have just given birth by first pouring gasoline on them is considered excessive. In general, horror films get criticized because of the content of pornography and violence in them. The crucial question is whether or not the Palasik film does not contain a moral message? This study uses a narrative analysis approach. Data was obtained through in-depth observations of the story of the film arranged from scene to scene. The author interprets the film scene after scene and concludes the moral message hidden in the story. The results showed that the Palasik film conveyed many moral messages, although not explicit. For example, it conveys that collective unity can defeat evil, excessive love can make a person less alert to something bad around them, aggressiveness is formed based on habits step by step, revenge has made humans lose their humanity (especially for invented creatures like Palasik which are certainly more destructive), and power-hungry humans are willing to serve Satan in order to achieve that power.

Questions have been raised by many filmmakers over the years as to whether the 1965 coup in Indonesia was the handiwork of the Indonesian Communist Party. American/British documentary filmmaker, Joshua Oppenheimer, who has previously made The Act of Killing on the same subject, poses the question again with a new documentary. But this time, he takes a cinematic approach by fully utilising the language of film to create a solemn and meditative work. He focuses on the faces and the silence of the individuals involved, in an effort to probe their minds. The individuals are some of the surviving killers as well as the brother and family of one of those who were killed. Oppenheimer also places emphasis on landscape as character. In the area of the killings, the landscape stands as a silent witness to the horrors perpetrated there. The demonisation of the communists continues till today in Indonesia, as it does in Malaysia as well as Singapore. The millennium saw revisionist histories surfacing that explored the blatant demonisation and vilification of communists. Films with a creative approach began to be made by young people who explored what had transpired, in an effort to foreground the truth.

Currently, film remains the main media for public entertainment. Of the many genres of film in Indonesia, horror is still the most popular. Unfortunately, Indonesian horror films pay little attention to the creative aspects of the story but focus on cinematography, producing repetitive performances which often follow stock templates. The story typically begins with moving to an empty house, getting lost in the forest, and being haunted by female ghosts. Even so, horror films like this are required to encourage critical and creative thinking of observers and film producers. Therefore, this study aims to discuss the disruptive element through repetitive stories in horror films that are able to open up opportunities for the emergence of creative interplay and its relevance to creative education through horror films in Indonesia. This research uses Maruska Svasek’s perspective on transit and transition which will dissect cultural phenomena in Indonesian horror films. In addition, the viewpoint from Derrida is used to deconstruct repetitive thoughts by film audiences to show the demythologization that occurs in current horror films. Data is taken from literature studies of Indonesian horror films with temporal limitations 2017-2019. Data was also collected using a questionnaire with the decoding-encoding belonging to Stuart Hall perspective. The results of the study show that the repetitive story culture is caused by Indonesian people’s interest in legendary urban legend stories. Utilizing urban legend as the main idea of the story, through Svasek’s perspective, creates attention to the culture that provides an opportunity for cultural preservation and revitalization. Keywords: Indonesian horror film, urban legend, deconstruction, cultural revitalization, creativity

Many films of the Australian New Wave (or Australian film renaissance) of the 1970s and 1980s can be defined as gothic, especially following Jonathan Rayner’s suggestion that “Instead of a genre, Australian Gothic represents a mode, a stance and an atmosphere, after the fashion of American Film Noir, with the appellation suggesting the inclusion of horrific and fantastic materials comparable to those of Gothic literature” (25). The American comparison is revealing. The 400 or so film productions of the Australian New Wave emerged, not in a vacuum, but in an increasingly connected and inter-mixed international space (Godden). Putatively discrete national cinemas weave in and out of each other on many levels. One such level concerns the reception critics give to films. This article will drill down to the level of the reception of two examples of Australian gothic film-making by two well-known American critics. Rayner’s comparison of Australian gothic with American film noir is useful; however, it begs the question of how American critics such as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris influentially shaped the reception of Australian gothic in America and in other locations (such as Australia itself) where their reviews found an audience either at the time or afterwards. The significance of the present article rests on the fact that, as William McClain observes, following in Rick Altman’s footsteps, “critics form one of the key material institutions that support generic formations” (54). This article nurtures the suggestion that knowing how Australian gothic cinema was shaped, in its infancy, in the increasingly important American market (a market of both commerce and ideas) might usefully inform revisionist studies of Australian cinema as a national mode. A more nuanced, globally informed representation of the origins and development of Australian gothic cinema emerges at this juncture, particularly given that American film reviewing in the 1970s and 1980s more closely resembled what might today be called film criticism or even film theory. The length of individual reviews back then, the more specialized vocabulary used, and above all the tendency for critics to assume more knowledge of film history than could safely be assumed in 2014—all this shows up the contrast with today. As Christos Tsiolkas notes, “in our age… film reviewing has been reduced to a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down” (56)! The 1970s and 1980s is largely pre-Internet, and critical voices such as Kael and Sarris dominated in print. The American reviews of Australian gothic films demonstrate how a different consciousness suffuses Kael’s and Sarris’s engagements with “Antipodean” (broadly Australian and New Zealand) cinema. Rayner’s locally specific definition of Australian gothic is distorted in their interpretations of examples of the genre. It will be argued that this is symptomatic of a particular blindspot, related to the politics and art of place, in the American reception of Wake in Fright (initially called Outback in America), directed by the Canadian Ted Kotcheff (1971) and The Year of Living Dangerously, directed by Peter Weir (1982). Space and argument considerations force this article to focus on the reviews of these films, engaging less in analysis of the films themselves. Suffice to say that they all fit broadly within Rayner’s definition of Australian gothic cinema. As Rayner states, three thematic concerns which permeate all the films related to the Gothic sensibility provide links across the distinctions of era, environment and character. They are: a questioning of established authority; a disillusionment with the social reality that that authority maintains; and the protagonist’s search for a valid and tenable identity once the true nature of the human environment has been revealed. (25) “The true nature of the human environment….” Here is the element upon which the American reviews of the Australian gothic founder. Explicitly in many films of this mode, and implicitly in nearly all of them, is the “human environment” of the Australian landscape, which operates less as a backdrop and more as a participating element, even a character, in the drama, saturating the mise-en-scène. In “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films,” Eva Rueschmann quotes Ross Gibson’s thesis from South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia that By featuring the land so emphatically… [Australian] films stake out something more significant than decorative pictorialism. Knowingly or unknowingly, they are all engaging with the dominant mythology of white Australia. They are all partaking of the landscape tradition which, for two hundred years, has been used by white Australians to promote a sense of the significance of European society in the “Antipodes”. (Rueschmann) The “emphatic” nature of the land in films like Wake in Fright, Mad Max 2 and Picnic at Hanging Rock actively contributes to the “atmosphere” of Australian gothic cinema (Rayner 25). This atmosphere floats across Australian film and literature. Many of the films mentioned in this article are adaptations from books, and Rayner himself stresses the similarity between Australian gothic and gothic literature (25). Significantly, the atmosphere of Australian gothic also floats across the fuzzy boundary between the gothic and road movies or road literature. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is obviously a road movie as well as a gothic text; so is Wake in Fright in its way; even Picnic at Hanging Rock contains elements of the road movie in all that travelling to and from the rock. Roads, then, are significant for Australian gothic cinema, for the road traverses the Australian (gothic) landscape and, in the opportunity it provides for moving through it at speed, tantalizes with the (unfulfillable) promise of an escape from its gothic horror. Australian roads are familiar, part of White European culture referencing the geometric precision of Roman roads. The Australian outback, by contrast, is unfamiliar, uncanny. Veined with roads, the outback invites the taming by “the landscape tradition” that it simultaneously rejects (Rueschmann). In the opening 360° pan of Wake in Fright the land frightens with its immensity and intensity, even as the camera displays the land’s “conquering” agent: not a road, but the road’s surrogate—a railway line. Thus, the land introduces the uncanny into Australian gothic cinema. In Freudian terms, the uncanny is that unsettling combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar. R. Gray calls it “the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar” (Gray). The “frightening” land is the very condition of the “comforting” road; no roads without a space for roads, and places for them to go. In her introduction to The Penguin Book of the Road, Delia Falconer similarly sutures the land to the uncanny, linking both of these with the first peoples of the Australian land: "Of course there is another 'poetry of the earth' whispering from the edges of our roads that gives so many of our road stories an extra charge, and that is the history of Aboriginal presence in this land. Thousands of years of paths and tribal boundaries also account for the uncanny sense of being haunted that dogs our travellers on their journeys (xvii). White Australia, as the local saying goes, has a black past, played out across the land. The film The Proposition instances this, with its gothic portrayal of the uncanny encroachments of the Australian “wilderness” into the domain of “civilization”. Furthermore, “our” overweening literal and metaphoric investment in the traditional quarter-acre block, not to mention in our roads, shows that “we” haven’t reconciled either with the land of Australia or with its original inhabitants: the Aboriginal peoples. Little wonder that Kael and Sarris couldn’t do so, as White Americans writing some forty years ago, and at such a huge geographic remove from Australia. As will be seen, the failure of these American film critics to comprehend the Australian landscape comes out—as both a “critical reaction” and a “reactive compensation”—in two, interwoven strands of their interpretations of Australian New Wave gothic cinema. A repulsion from, and an attraction to, the unrecognized uncanny is evidenced. The first strand is constituted in the markedly anthropological aspect to the film reviews: anthropological elements of the text itself are either disproportionately magnified or longed for. Here, “anthropological” includes the sociological and the historical. Secondly, Kael and Sarris use the films they review from Australian gothic cinema as sites upon which to trial answers to the old and persistent question of how the very categories of art and politics relate. Initially sucked out of the reviews (strand one), politics and art thus rush back in (strand two). In other words, the American failure to engage deeply with the land triggers an initial reading of films like Wake in Fright less as films per se and more as primary texts or one-to-one documentations of Australia. Australia presents for anthropological, even scientific atomization, rather than as a place in active, creative and complex relationship with its rendering in mise-en-scène. Simultaneously though, the absence of the land nags—eats away at the edges of critical thinking—and re-emerges (like a Freudian return of the repressed) in an attempt by the American critics to exploit their film subjects as an opportunity for working out how politics and art (here cinema) relate. The “un-seen” land creates a mis-reading amongst the American critics (strand one), only to force a compensatory, if somewhat blindsided, re-reading (strand two). For after all, in this critical “over-looking” of the land, and thus of the (ongoing) Aboriginal existence in and with the land, it is politics and art that is most at stake. How peoples (indigenous, settler or hybrid peoples) are connected to and through the land has perhaps always been Australia’s principal political and artistic question. How do the American reviews speak to this question? Sarris did not review Wake in Fright. Kael reviewed it, primarily, as a text at the intersection of fiction and documentary, ultimately privileging the latter. Throughout, her critical coordinates are American and, to a degree, literary. Noting the “stale whiff of Conrad” she also cites Outback’s “additional interest” in its similarity with “recent American movies [about] American racism and capitalist exploitation and the Vietnam war” (415). But her most pointed intervention comes in the assertion that there is “enough narrative to hold the social material together,” as if this were all narrative were good for: scaffolding for sociology (416). Art and culture are left out. Even as Kael mentions the “treatment of the Aborigines,” she misses the Aboriginal cultural moment of the opening shot of the land; this terrain, she writes, is “without a trace of culture” (416). Then, after critiquing what she sees as the unconvincing lesson of the schoolteacher’s moral demise, comes this: “But a more serious problem is that (despite the banal photography) the semi-documentary aspects of the film are so much more vivid and authentic and original than the factitious Conradian hero that we want to see more of that material—we want to learn more” (416-417). Further on, in this final paragraph, Kael notes that, while “there have been other Australian films, so it’s not all new” the director and scriptwriter “have seen the life in a more objective way, almost as if they were cultural anthropologists…. Maybe Kotcheff didn’t dare to expand this vision at the expense of the plot line, but he got onto something bigger than the plot” (417). Kael’s “error”, as it were, is to over-look how the land itself stretches the space of the film, beyond plot, to occupy the same space as her so-called “something bigger”, which itself is filled out by the uncanniness of the land as the intersections of both indigenous and settler (road-based) cultures and their representations in art (417). The “banal photography” might be better read as the film’s inhabitation of these artistic/cultural intersections (416). Kael’s Wake in Fright piece illustrates the first strand of the American reviews of Australian gothic cinema. Missing the land’s uncanniness effectively distributes throughout the review an elision of culture and art, and a reactive engagement with the broadly anthropological elements of Kotcheff’s film. Reviews of The Year of Living Dangerously by Kael and Sarris also illustrate the first strand of the American-Australian reviewing nexus, with the addition, also by each critic, of the second strand: the attempt to reconnect and revitalize the categories of politics and art. As with Wake in Fright, Kael introduces an anthropological gambit into Weir’s film, privileging its documentary elements over its qualities as fiction (strand one). “To a degree,” she writes, “Weir is the victim of his own skill at creating the illusion of authentic Third World misery, rioting, and chaos” (454). By comparison with “earlier, studio-set films” (like Casablanca [452]), where such “backgrounds (with their picturesque natives) were perfectly acceptable as backdrops…. Here… it’s a little obscene” (454). Kael continues: “Documentaries, TV coverage, print journalism, and modern history itself have changed audiences’ responses, and when fake dilemmas about ‘involvement’ are cooked up for the hero they’re an embarrassment” (454-455). Film is pushed to cater to anthropology besides art. Mirroring Kael’s strand-one response, Sarris puts a lot of pressure on Weir’s film to “perform” anthropologically—as well as, even instead of, artistically. The “movie”, he complains “could have been enjoyed thoroughly as a rousingly old-fashioned Hollywood big-star entertainment were it not for the disturbing vistas of somnolent poverty on view in the Philippines, the location in which Indonesian poverty in 1965 was simulated” (59). Indeed, the intrusive reality of poverty elicits from Sarris something very similar to Kael’s charge of the “obscenity of the backdrop” (454): We cannot go back to Manderley in our movie romances. That much is certain. We must go forward into the real world, but in the process, we should be careful not to dwarf our heroes and heroines with the cosmic futility of it all. They must be capable of acting on the stage of history, and by acting, make a difference in our moral perception of life on this planet. (59) Sarris places an extreme, even outrageous, strand-one demand on Weir’s film to re-purpose its fiction (what Kael calls “romantic melodrama” [454]) to elicit the categories of history and anthropology—that last phrase, “life on this planet”, sounds like David Attenborough speaking! More so, anthropological atomization is matched swiftly to a strand-two demand, for this passage also anticipates the rapprochement of politics and art, whereby art rises to the level of politics, requiring movie “heroes and heroines” to make a “moral difference” on a historical if not on a “cosmic” level (59). It is precisely in this, however, that Weir’s film falls down for Sarris. “The peculiar hollowness that the more perceptive reviewers have noted in The Year of Living Dangerously arises from the discrepancy between the thrilling charisma of the stars and the antiheroic irrelevance of the characters they play to the world around them” (59). Sarris’s spatialized phrase here (“peculiar hollowness”) recalls Kael’s observation that Wake in Fright contains “something bigger than the plot” (417). In each case, the description is doubling, dis-locating—uncanny. Echoing the title of Eva Rueschmann’s article, both films, like the Australian landscape itself, are “out of place” in their interpretation by these American critics. What, really, does Sarris’s “peculiar hollowness” originate in (59)? In what “discrepancy” (59)? There is a small but, in the context of this article, telling error in Sarris’s review of Weir’s film. Kael, correctly, notes that “the Indonesian settings had to be faked (in the Philippines and Australia)” (inserted emphasis) (452). Sarris mentions only the Philippines. From little things big things grow. Similar to how Kael overlooks the uncanny in Wake in Fright’s mise-en-scène, Sarris “sees” a “peculiar hollowness” where the land would otherwise be. Otherwise, that is, in the perspective of a cinema (Kotcheff’s, Weir’s) that comprehends “the true nature of the [Australian, gothic] human environment” (Rayner 25). Of course, it is not primarily a matter of how much footage Weir shot in Australia. It is the nature of the cinematography that matters most. For his part, Sarris damns it as “pretentiously picturesque” (59). Kael, meanwhile, gets closer perhaps to the ethics of the uncanny cinematography of The Year of Living Dangerously in her description of “intimations, fragments, hints and portents… on a very wide screen” (451). Even so, it will be remembered, she does call the “backgrounds… obscene” (454). Kael and Sarris see less than they “see”. Again like Sarris, Kael goes looking in Weir’s film for a strand-two rapprochement of politics and art, as evidenced by the line “The movie displays left-wing attitudes, but it shows no particular interest in politics” (453). It does though, only Kael is blind to it because she is blind to the land and, equally, to the political circumstances of the people of the land. Kael likely never realized the “discrepancy” in her critique of The Year of Living Dangerously’s Billy Kwan as “the same sort of in-on-the-mysteries-of-the-cosmos character that the aborigine actor Gulpilil played in Weir’s 1977 The Last Wave” (455). All this, she concludes, “might be boiled down to the mysticism of L.A.: ‘Go with the flow’” (455)! Grouping characters and places together like this, under the banner of L.A. mysticism, brutally erases the variations across different, uncanny, gothic, post-colonial landscapes. It is precisely here that politics and art do meet, in Weir’s film (and Kotcheff’s): in the artistic representation of the land as an index of the political relations of indigenous, settler and hybrid communities. (And not down the rabbit hole of the “specifics” of politics that Kael claims to want [453]). The American critics considered in this article are not in “bad faith” or a-political. Sarris produced a perceptive, left-leaning study entitled Politics and Cinema, and many of Kael’s reviews, along with essays like “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West,” contain sophisticated, liberalist analyses of the political circumstances of Native Americans. The crucial point is that, as “critics form[ing] one of the key material institutions that support generic formations,” Sarris and Kael impacted majorly on the development of Australian gothic cinema, in the American context—impacted especially, one could say, on the (mis-)understanding of the land-based, uncanny politics of this mode in its Australian setting (McClain 54). Kael’s and Sarris’s reviews of My Brilliant Career, along with Judith Maslin’s review, contain traits similar to those considered in depth in the reviews studied above. Future research might usefully study this significant impact more closely, weaving in an awareness of the developing dynamics of global film productions and co-productions since the 1970s, and thereby focusing on Australian gothic as international cinema. Was, for example, the political impact of later films like The Proposition influenced, even marginally, by the (mis-)readings of Sarris and Kael? In conclusion here, it suffices to note that, even as the American reviewers reduced Australian cinema art to “blank” documentary or “neutral” anthropology, nevertheless they evidenced, in their strand-two responses, the power of the land (as presented in the cinematography and mise-en-scène) to call out—across an increasingly globalized domain of cinematic reception—for the fundamental importance of the connection between politics and art. Forging this connection, in which all lands and the peoples of all lands are implicated, should be, perhaps, the primary and ongoing concern of national and global cinemas of the uncanny, gothic mode, or perhaps even any mode. References Casablanca. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros, 1942. Falconer, Delia. “Introduction.” The Penguin Book of the Road. Ed. Delia Falconer. Melbourne: Viking-Penguin Books, 2008. xi-xxvi. Gibson, Ross. South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992. Godden, Matt. “An Essay on Australian New Wave Cinema.” 9 Jan. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.golgotha.com.au/2013/01/09/an-essay-on-australian-new-wave-cinema/›. Gray, R. “Freud, ‘The Uncanny.’” 15 Nov. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://courses.washington.edu/freudlit/Uncanny.Notes.html›. Kael, Pauline. “Australians.” Review of My Brilliant Career. 15 Sep. 1980. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 54-62. Kael, Pauline. “Literary Echoes—Muffled.” Review of Outback [Wake in Fright]. 4 March 1972. Deeper into Movies. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press-Little, Brown and Company, 1973. 413-419. Kael, Pauline. “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West.” Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. London: Arrow Books, 1987. 38-46. Kael, Pauline. “Torrid Zone.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. 21 Feb. 1983. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 451-456. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Dir. George Miller. Warner Bros, 1981. Maslin, Janet. “Film: Australian ‘Brilliant Career’ by Gillian Armstrong.” Review of My Brilliant Career. New York Times (6 Oct. 1979.): np. McClain, William. “Western, Go Home! Sergio Leone and the ‘Death of the Western’ in American Film Criticism.” Journal of Film and Video 62.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 52-66. My Brilliant Career. Dir. Gillian Armstrong. Peace Arch, 1979. Picnic at Hanging Rock. Dir. Peter Weir. Picnic Productions, 1975. Rayner, Jonathan. Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Rueschmann, Eva. “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films.” Post Script (22 Dec. 2005). 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Out+of+place%3A+reading+%28post%29+colonial+landscapes+as+Gothic+space+in...-a0172169169›. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (4 Feb. 1980): np. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus: Journalistic Ethics in Java.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. Village Voice 28 (1 Feb. 1983): 59. Sarris, Andrew. “Liberation, Australian Style.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (15 Oct. 1979): np. Sarris, Andrew. Politics and Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. The Last Wave. Dir. Peter Weir. Ayer Productions, 1977. The Proposition. Dir. John Hillcoat. First Look Pictures, 2005. The Year of Living Dangerously. Dir. Peter Weir. MGM, 1982. Tsiolkas, Christos. “Citizen Kael.” Review of Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow. The Monthly (Feb. 2012): 54-56. Wake in Fright. Dir. Ted Kotcheff. United Artists, 1971.

In the two decades since the fall of the New Order regime in 1998, Indonesia cinema has become one of the most productive and exciting film industries in Asia. From a position in the 1990s when local films were on the cultural periphery, they are now part of the mainstream with two new films in the cinemas every week. This book traces how the film industry reformed and returned to popularity and conceptualises it as a process of going mainstream. It overturns long held paradigms of national cinema and statism to see the film industry as pop culture in which market mechanisms are determinant. In going mainstream, new independent-minded filmmakers representing new creativity had to accommodate with capital and producers from old production companies. Appeal to audiences has resulting in the reimagining of the horror film and its traumas and the representation of new kinds of piety in a new subgenre Islamic themed films. Yet legacy structures and players remain, as the film industry has struggled to overcome regulation and censorship and the oligopoly of senior producers. In catering to a growing audience, the exhibition sector has become the focus of new investment as it becomes a site for competing local operators and global capital. The book argues for a reconceptualization of Indonesian cinema as pop culture with consequences to how Asian cinema is studied.

Horror film is one of the most popular genres in the new mainstream Indonesian cinema. Dismissed by most critics as cheap and commercialised, this chapter draws on scholarship that links horror cinema to allegorical representations of historical and national trauma. Through an examination of the narrative features of post-1998 horror, this chapter shows how horror films are used by the young generation of filmmakers to suggest and evoke the collective trauma of the New Order regime and its violence, especially the mass killings of 1965-1966 and the urban riots in May 1998. Two decades after reformasi, horror films remain as popular as ever, but have pointed towards more tangible efforts in justice and historical reconciliation.

Chapter 4 studies Miguel Gomes’s Tabu (2012), another eloquent example of the negative use of cinema for realist ends. As is the case with the The Act of Killing, Tabu addresses a nation’s tainted historical past by means of a relentless questioning of the film medium and its representational properties. Though similar in their self-reflexive method, the two films differ greatly in their approach. Whereas the former tracks down perpetrators of genocide in Indonesia in order to obtain the evidence of their crimes, in the latter, the horrors of Portuguese colonialism in Africa remain conspicuous by their absence. Both in Mozambique and Lisbon, where the film was shot, the sombre legacy of colonialism makes itself felt by resisting representation.

This chapter examines the aftereffects of the U.S.-backed New Order government’s violent excesses and their legacy of trauma, crisis, and horror. Since Suharto, the country’s struggling “transition” into a democratic civil society has been hampered by its inability to acknowledge and move past the killings of 1965-1966. Indonesia’s genre-dominated cinema reinforced New Order ideology because its formulae begot predictability, which dovetailed with the New Order’s premium on social and political stability. At the same time, Hollywood genres Americanized colonial subjects and their memories. As a result, even films precipitated by the reformasi movement working through the traumas of Suharto’s violence, take continued comfort in generic closure and resolution. For example, Americanism functioning as psychic conduits and historical indices in reformasi coming-of-age stories, emerges through the discursive beats and rhythms of the road film.