The Shaman

An unimaginable number of horror films are being produced in Indonesia at the moment. A new one comes out virtually every week and The Shaman is one of the better and most recent examples.
The film also aims to pay homage to older Indonesian horror films, so it’s unmistakably and unashamedly a genre film. It opens at once with shrieks in a dark forest. A well-shaped young woman is running away from danger, screaming. She’s pursued by a huge masked man, a kind of executioner. When she trips, she doesn’t stand a chance. The executioner soon does his job. He disappears with a bucket containing something bloody, leaving the rest of the corpse behind. Then we look in an old ethnographic book and see photos of tattooed warriors. The relationship is clear. Old magic powers form the bloody motivation of the executioner.
A horror film has to frighten in an entertaining way and this film does so with great self assurance. The film maintains its dark and effective narrative style to the very end. The outdoor shots were made around Bogor, a rainy Javan mountain town famous for its strange plants, active volcanoes and mysterious stories.
Director Raditya Sidharta also made one part of the horror omnibus film Takut: Faces of Fear being screened in this programme. He made the fifth part, The Rescue, a short science-fiction-like film with modern cannibals. (GjZ)

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