The Ghosts of Indonesia’s New Order: Joko Anwar, Ayu Utami and Aesthetics of Being Haunted in the Reformasi.
In May of 1998, as a result of mounting popular dissent, growing violence, and a complete loss of soft power throughout the Asian financial crisis, Indonesia’s military dictator President Suharto stepped down after 31 years of control over the incredibly young nation. One month earlier, Ayu Utami’s first novel Saman was published. In a time of massive political upheaval, there was a simultaneous upheaval occurring in the world of Indonesian literature. Saman was only published as a result of its success in the Jakarta Arts Council’s Novel Competition, and upon release to the general public the book proved a literary sensation, though not solely of a celebratory variety. The novel’s prose is often described as “sensuous” or “poetic” or “rich”... though I suspect that, more frequently, readers are responding to Utami’s bluntness. The book is incredibly frank in its discussions of sex and sexuality. The novel’s namesake, Saman, is a Catholic priest whose sexual desires and explorations occur in tandem with his working class anti-colonial political awakenings. The book also features young women fantasizing about their plans to lose their virginities, and a mentally disabled character having sex with anyone who will permit it.
The sex took up most of the discussions of the book at the time of its release. However, there is a brief section, less than a single chapter, that is the standout section of the entire novel. A flashback to Saman’s childhood in a Sumatran oil town. This episode changes from a poetic realist novel into a folktale. Saman’s childhood is rendered as the types of ghost stories that have filled out the vast majority of legends, myth, children’s stories and cautionary tales found in every corner of every island in the archipelago. This traditional folktale style is jarring, both in terms of the content of the story and the prose used to tell it. The language is mythic. The sentences are short. The most mystical component of the entire novel is rendered with a complete bluntness. There is less sensuality here… but rather a straightforward accounting. This is the episode that seems to have the least amount of “poetry” in its prose. This is the one rendered merely as straightforward, documentary fact.
I have roughly translated this section of Utami’s novel. I highly recommend reading the whole book as it is truly excellent, and there is an English translation by Pamela Allen available. The translation linked above and in screenshots below is mine, and not representative of Allen’s, which I have not read. I have also abridged a few things and added a couple notes for the sake of clarity of the folkloric elements.
This episode of the novel, as an incongruity, interacts in very interesting ways with the rest of the book. However, I find it to be an incredibly effective short horror story in its own right. Even more interesting, is how much this specific story seems to mirror a work by another major Indonesian Gen-X artist, Joko Anwar. When I first made this connection I was more amused than anything else. At first glance, these two people could not be more dissimilar. One famous for his commitment to horror films, the other an investigative journalist and literary fiction writer tied to the contemporary development of feminist perspectives in Indonesian art and culture. However, by separating Utami’s ghost story from the rest of her novel we can approach both Utami and Anwar through the lens of Indonesian Horror in the reformation era (or reformasi).
While Utami quickly became one of the figures to illustrate the seismic shift in literature during the reformasi, Joko Anwar is, in many ways, an analogue to her for the film industry. Saman is noted for its willingness to engage bluntly with social taboos of the era. Anwar first made a name for himself, not as a key figure in Indonesian horror, but as the screenwriter for Arisan! (aka The Gathering) Nia Dinata’s 2003 comedy of manners. Much like Utami’s novel, this is a film that became a focal point for discussion due to its engaging taboos through its depiction of homosexual relationships, women contending with sexless marriages, and the introduction of a (now omnipresent) trope featuring the mixture of English and Jakarta slang as an indication of class, one that is employed as overtly, simply, and subtextually as a posh accent in classical British films. Utami’s novel was seen as the figurehead for a new literary movement dubbed, somewhat pejoratively, as “Sastra Wangi” or “Fragrant Literature”. Arisan! in conjunction with the previous year’s Ada Apa Dengan Cinta (or What’s Up With Cinta?) ushered in an era of boundary pushing in regards to integrating depiction of social taboos, class critique, and an overall more direct tone when engaging with bildungsroman or comedies of manners. It is hard to imagine films like Riri Riza’s 3 Hari Untuk Selamanya (3 Days Until Eternity) or Kamila Andini’s Yuni without either Utami’s novel or Anwar’s screenplay as precursors.
3 Days Until Eternity
However, most interesting to me are the films that overtly carried over the most popular elements of Suharto’s dictatorship (most commonly referred to as the New Order). From 1950-1965 Indonesian film was subject to censorship, but also engaged more directly with the kind of social observation and critique that foresees novels like Saman and films like Arisan!. Usmar Ismail, one of the most heralded directors of the era wrote directly of his admiration for Italian Neo-Realism, and Bachtiar Siagian crafted a career based upon human observation and recognition of the class divisions that remained in place as remnants of the colonial system from which Indonesia had only recently emerged. Notably, during these years, the Indonesian Communist Party had effectively lobbied the government to ban American films from Indonesian cinemas. This led to a sort of self-imposed bubble in which, theoretically, Indonesian film had an opportunity to develop in its own manner to express a uniquely Indonesian perspective with minimized outside aesthetic and ideological influence. The project was cut short by the coup of 1965 and Suharto seizing power. Suharto removed the American film ban, encouraged a great deal of international economic collaboration within the film industry, and oversaw a censorship board with a different set of concerns and values than in the first 15 years of the new nation’s film industry.
From this milieu rose the Indonesian exploitation film. Many of which became cult classics, even abroad, and are now being rediscovered on blu-ray and streaming by American horror fans. Films like the iconic filmography of Suzzanna, such as Ratu Ilmu Hitam (The Queen of Black Magic), or Sundelbolong seemed to have an easier time getting past the censors than many films in the earlier tradition. These films were not taken seriously by academics until relatively recently. Salim Said, who wrote the iconic history of Indonesian film Shadows on the Silver Screen, barely referenced these works despite their consistent ability to draw audiences, only briefly mentioning the phenomena with the phrase “in this era there were also many trashy films produced.” These “trashy films” are notable, in part, because of their ability to make the censors look the other way. There are probably three primary reasons for this: The first is simply that the New Order regime was much more comfortable with graphic depictions of violence than they were with uncomfortable social issues that they felt could potentially undermine the “ideal society” they were building. The second is that the economic power of these movies (particularly as an export) was undeniable, and the New Order regime, above all else, respected economic power (which is why Suharto was so weakened by the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis.) Finally, these films were largely adaptations of traditional Indonesian folk tales. From a nationalistic perspective, all questionable content was in service of building up the national cultural identity, and maintaining the traditional stories that had been passed down through generations. Ironically, the aesthetics of exploitation, which only arose in Indonesia after the New Order era began, can be directly tied to American and Western European forms. So while the tales themselves maintain the traditional Indonesian cultural elements, the films feel right at home when viewed amongst western exploitation classics like Cannibal Holocaust, Bay of Blood, or Blacula.
This brings us back to Joko Anwar, who began directing after the massive financial success of Arisan! and slowly transitioned his own work into the realm of horror with a specific focus on convincing Rapi Films (the original producer of so many Indonesian Exploitation films) to give him the rights to remake Sisworo Gautama Putra’s 1980 film Pengabdi Setan (Satan’s Slave). After years of producing genre work to convince the company that he was capable of making a serviceable remake, he accomplished his task in 2017 with his own Pengabdi Setan (this time most frequently translated as a plural Satan’s Slaves). The film was a critical and commercial hit, leading to more opportunities within the realm of horror. Anwar’s career has proven to be uniquely successful in the international market when compared to other major Indonesian horror filmmakers, and he has continued to re-make exploitation films of the New Order, and traditional Indonesian Folktales. He wrote the script for Kimo Stamboel’s remake of Queen of Black Magic, and the 2025 film Legenda Kelam Malin Kundang (literally “The Dark Legend of Malin Kundang” but released in English as Smothered) which is based upon one of the most famous folktales from the Island of Sumatra. He directed a remake of Lilik Sudjio’s Gundala which was perhaps less an exploitation film than simply a “trashy film” as Salim Said would say, and the original work Perempuan Tanah Jahanam (literally Woman of Hellish Land, released internationally as Impetigore) which utilizes Wayang Kulit, or traditional Indonesian puppet theater as a mystical force of evil.
Queen of Black Magic (1981) and The Queen of Black Magic (2019)
The fact that Anwar has continued the tradition of Indonesian ghost stories and exploitation films is not strange. He and Ayu Utami are both Gen X artists… children of the New Order, both adults by the time Suharto stepped down, both too young to have developed in the 15 years of unlimited potential post-revolution. They grew up steeped in Western and American media culture, imported en-mass, they grew up with the exploitation aesthetics as the primary aesthetics of many traditional folktales and ghost stories, and they grew up under a repressive regime that limited the frank discussions of many social issues they could easily observe occurring around themselves. This milieu seems to have led them both to a very specific lens through which they engage with their own traditional ghost stories.
The ghost episode in Utami’s Saman maps so well onto Anwar’s re-make of Satan’s Slaves, despite the differences in artistic intention, and despite the differences in art forms, possibly as a direct result of the social environment curated by Suharto’s New Order regime leading to the reformasi-era artists desire to re-tell their childhood stories in a manner that was publicly unavailable their entire childhoods. Utami focuses on religious minorities in her story (something Anwar has also done, when he played a priest in the film Ave Maryam) and introduces specifically a layer of moral ambiguity that does not seem to exist on the textual level in the exploitation films of the New Order. In her book Indonesian Cinema: Framing The New Order, Krishna Sen argues that with a single exception (Sjumandjaya’s Si Mamad) every film produced within the New Order era adheres to the same basic structure of following a character from an ordered life, through a period of disorder, then finally back to orderliness again (sometimes through great sacrifice). This is easily observed in the original Satan’s Slave. An agnostic family living a relatively stable life begins experiencing hauntings and attacks from the undead after the death of the mother. Through these hauntings and attacks, the family falls into chaos and disarray. However, after finding their way back to prayer through the help of an Islamic scholar, they are able to defeat the evil forces through the power of Allah. Joko Anwar’s Satan’s Slaves does not accomplish the same structural cleanliness, and the textual approach to the shining light of Islam is much more ambiguous.
After the death of the mother, the family’s neighbor, Ustad, gathers the local muslims to attend a prayer for her soul. This is depicted with a group of older men sitting in a circle chanting the shahadah in unison. Their voices are rhythmically aligned perfectly, but all of different pitches and timbres, and so creates a mildly satanic sonic impression not too dissimilar from the chants of the Satanic cult that Rini discovers by playing her mother’s record in reverse. Anwar’s film is much more skeptical of universal answers. The original Satan’s Slave shows that the ghosts, demons, and pocong can all be defeated through the light of Islam (much the way the black magic wielding dukun is defeated in The Queen of Black Magic, or the way that Suzzanna’s Alisa is finally freed from her vengeful ghost form at the end of Sundelbolong. Anwar’s Satan’s slaves presents Islam as a structured system of belief that is capable of great repression. In the original Queen of Black Magic there’s a powerful sequence in which a young Islamic theologian is praying, and while lost in his prayers, he remains almost supernaturally impervious to the attacks from the dukun using black magic in an attempt to kill him. In Satan’s Slaves Rini attempts to pray away the ghosts, only to be attacked by a spirit imitating her mother. She tries to run away, only for the cloth of her abaya to trap her with the ghost. The power of prayer is not only futile here, it’s actually an additional impediment.
While the family of Anwar’s film is not above turning to religion in a time of desperation, they are simply grasping towards anything that appears to provide answers. However, as Anwar likely experienced firsthand, those claiming to have all the answers are the ones who should arouse the most suspicion. The ghost of the New Order regime presents itself in this postmodern skepticism.
Both Utami’s ghost story and Anwar’s film deal with infertility and a mother’s sin. Both seem to suggest a deal with supernatural entities in order to conceive. And both mothers condemn their family to suffer consequences of their supernatural pact. Utami’s story is the more subjective of the two, being largely from the point of view of Wis, who is a child throughout the events depicted. There is an argument to be made that we are experiencing a child’s attempt to come to terms with his mother’s affair. In Satan’s Slaves the children are faced with the reality that their mother was repeatedly impregnated by people other than their father. Both horror tales are about the loss of dignity and respect for the children’s mother. Utami’s fable ends with Wis slapping his own mother and shifting his loyalties towards his father. Satan’s slaves ends with the family starting a new life away from the home they had lived in with their mother.
In Anwar’s script for the re-make of The Queen of Black Magic we watch a similar recontextualization take place. The family must come to terms with the culpability of their father in the mistreatment of Murni. When they realize they are being tortured for the sins of their father they cry out “we didn’t know anything about this.” Murni turns, almost into the lens of the camera and states “but not knowing is also a sin.” This feels like an essential refrain of the reformasi. For Gen X Indonesians, growing up in the wake of genocide that killed around 1 million fellow Indonesians, largely carried out by citizen paramilitary organizations and allowed through the tacit consent of the rest of the population, the question of “what did your dad do in the past?” must be incredibly pressing, if also taboo. Utami and Anwar don’t rest solely on the sins of the father trope. They look towards the mothers as well. Utami’s text is complicated with a subtle feminist undercurrent that suggests a more complicated inner life for Wis’s mother than we can access from his childish perspective. Anwar too weaves prejudice into his narrative. The mother, before fame, was considered a poor match for her husband and her value seems to arise from her breeding capacity. If not knowing what happened in the past is a sin, what of the women who remained in place throughout the sin, knowing, maybe participating, because the social structures in which they found themselves provided such few options that they chose what they determined to be the only path forward for them? When we learn about our mothers' sins, how harshly do we condemn them? This preoccupation with the past is one of the defining features of Anwar’s horror output. It is equally prevalent in his film Siksa Kabur (Grave Torture) which is split into two parts, focusing on the protagonist siblings’ childhood, then the impacts of their childhood in their lives as adults. Utami’s novel starts in 1997, then proceeds to move back and forth through time, almost implying that history isn’t just continuous, but concurrent. What happened didn’t only lead to this moment, it informs this moment. Not always in ways that are healthy or pleasant. Intergenerational trauma constantly presents itself. The most omnipresent ghost in both of these stories is the specter of the New Order regime.
