[ENGLISH]
Fear has been part of all beings’ emotions since forever. Yet, humans are the only beings who record, archive, manifest, project, and multiply the fear through media, audio visual, literature, and other cultural products. As a complex emotion, fear has been created throughout many factors, and up until today, what is your favorite kind of fear cocktail recipe?
Most fear related products, including horror cinema’s early inspirations came from folklore, religious beliefs and superstitions of different cultures, to Gothic and horror literature. In the Western, later, films like Nosferatu (1922) and Dracula (1931) were made and released. While in Eastern, the scary films like horror, thriller and suspense genres come from Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and the Philippines, despite that it generally follows the representations of Japan and Korea. As a genre, in Asia, the sources of frightening elements are usually nationally-specific in each region’s horror films. It tried to intertwine the national histories and shared cultural elements across several Asian countries. Borrowing Fassbinder’s title "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul", I see Asian horror films as embodiments of stress, terror, vengeance, and oppression, in a cycle of productivity and consumption.
Offering the terror through the eyes, the experience of horror cinema embodied its cycle into the audiences as a circulating rumour, mouth-to-mouth advertising, paranoia symptoms to become the addicting entertainment and commercial commodity. The reflection of fear nowadays is widened more with the reaction or commentary videos that are circulating around the internet. It brought the proximity and locality into commonality in Asian countries.
Then, it becomes interesting to see how Taiwan typically didn’t get the mention as they relatively produce not many horror films, yet at the same time, Indonesia and Taiwan share some similarities in the pattern and reason of productivity. With better adaptation, better timing, better craft and innovation, compared to other Southeast Asian countries, the findings in between Taiwan and Indonesia are more interesting than the recipes and products from other more established countries like Japan or Korea. The commonalities shown in between these two countries are catering well to the audiences. With their own characteristics of presentation, was the similar timing of birth a coincidence? Or indeed, these two countries knew their vision well to create their own loyal market.
How does fear from being a natural emotion get to be exploited as commodity and entertainment?
From the popular horror products of Indonesia and Taiwan that I could find from TV and internet, I want to sample out some items from early 2000 to early 2020-ish. Other than horror novels, short stories, and other literature items, after the technology transition and dissemination was established, more cultural products are adapting their format in the favour of the genre, into new commodities such as TV serials, video games, and horror story vlogs. To revisit, Indonesia had this TV serial called Kismis (abbreviated from Kisah Kisah Misteri, translated: Mystery Tales) which started to air in 2003 every Saturday night for 3 years.
And around the same time, Taiwan mystery show called Blue Crystal (藍色水玲瓏) was aired since late 2002 to early 2008 within 254 episodes.
These TV shows were made of casual storytelling, due to the show duration, they had quite different ways on how the characters or stories were built and developed. Kismis was aired for a 30 mins slot and filled with commercials, making it about only 20 mins for each episode. So the approach was compact, quick, direct, not in a linear style. Blue Crystal usually went for 1 hour and each story can be told in up to 2 parts (in total 2 hours). Making it can go more slowly in revealing things and often include the daily life, domestic conflicts of the character, also showing and relating to guilt, shame, regret or the manipulative side of human beings.
In short, Blue Crystal was more in the mystery drama genre and Kismis was more in the news flash style. I think it’s strongly correlated with how people like their television contents in each country and how their TV culture actually was. Remembering how it was in Indonesia, TV shows were often made for a 30 mins length and 1 hour on top for special prime time shows, so in a day, the TV company can provide many types of shows for all ages. While in Taiwan, other than Blue Crystal, they also have other similar types of shows, focusing on drama, romance, modernity, crime, etc. with very similar lengths and approaches.
In the show, basically both tried to archive the local beliefs, jitteriness, temporary trends, local context, events, and myths. Often approached with story reconstruction, particular class system backgrounds, and sometimes how life changes after the events. They engaged the audiences with a narrator or host, and occasionally with the interviews or testimony from the locals. Elaborating on how it was originally started, how the otherworldly beings showed up in front of the humans, how the humans tried to rationalise the mysterious event, and even how they dealt with the shock.
Another product like video games: Detention (2017, inspired by Taiwanese culture and mythology) and DreadOut (2014, inspired by Indonesian folklore and urban legend), both games pick a high school girl as the main character. Later, both titles are also being adapted into the big screen and released in 2019.
Entering the new millennium, horror movies have been something popular in the market. Taking ideas of metaphysic world and being, challenging the order and disorder, and introducing the locality as believable sources. Starting in the 2000s, we had so many phenomenal titles from all over the world, Ring (Japan, 1998-2000), Ju On: The Curse (Japan, 2000), Shutter (Thailand, 2004), Dumplings (Hong Kong, 2004), Jelangkung (Indonesia, 2001), Keramat (Indonesia, 2009), Silk (Taiwan, 2006) to Good Will Evil (Taiwan, 2008).
The sustaining demand of horror movies makes it nothing new under the sun and the extra creativity is needed to make things work. Other than the former inspirations, filmmakers started to marry more sub-genres with horror movies (e.g. slasher horror) which are shown in titles like Rumah Dara / Macabre (Indonesia, 2009) and Invitation Only (Taiwan, 2009).
In Macabre, the filmmaker focused on the man-slaughtery ritual which was done by a family to have immortal life, while in Invitation Only, it was pretty much an act of revenge to the poor, to make the rich feel good. Both titles’ main plot were about how accepting an invitation from someone might make you end up in misery and death, also both are playing around the idea of abuse of power. In Macabre, the victims of this slaughter were typically a group of youngsters, targeted by the perpetrator, using a young woman as sex appealing bait. Along the story, it showed the sides of allurement, curiosity, man’s ego, and missed intuition. The slasher was started after a dinner where the disorderness kicked in and the chaos was on the game. Survival instinct, defence mechanism, and layered emotions of fear were shown by the victims along with the bloody show, asking for mercy and remission was just normal.
Meanwhile in Invitation Only, it also used the young woman trick as sex appealing bait before the disorder started to happen. Creativity and local context were there to make it more grounded to the audiences. Just like in Macabre, the director’s concept and the artistic department might not show much trendy styles of late 2000s the way Invitation Only did. Yet, Macabre chose to play with little details like the modified car plate number, using the city code and numbers combined to say MEAT for the meat truck. It was also working well in Invitation Only how they crafted the reality in their characters, through the fashion, the hairstyles, and the conversation topics. It was interesting to see how the class system was actually designed and used as a bridge to make the story work. How in both films, the middle-class, working, regular people were targeted to be the victims. How the perpetrator who holds more power, more wealth, and more commodity uses the slasher game to fulfil their ego, desire, in exchange of petty wishes and dreams of the powerless. At last, how in both films, the perpetrator tried to cover this ritual as a tight secret.
With the long lasting greed of power they have, it leaves a question mark in the end asking is it really the end when we have some survivors after 90 mins of the show? Or will it be repeated again, endlessly? As the survivor(s) finally got out from the dark deep bloody mud, how real is it juxtaposed with our reality?
With these exposures, we get addicted to the emotion of fear as entertainment though some people may avoid this genre as much as they can. The pattern of the market in the 2000-2019 seem to be recycling and upcycling the idea and mix of horror-terror, supernatural, order-disorder, generational curse, vengeance and violence. Due to this boredom and repetition, people may have had enough of horror movies in the cinema. Yet, horror movies were something that kept getting produced no matter what. It was never a hiatus. Meaning, horror movies, no matter how cheap thrills they are, people are always looking for pleasure through it.
What’s new?
After the pandemic hit in 2020, the global cinema industry was struggling. Filmmaking was hard and distribution was even harder. Some films are getting postponed for such a long time, some are giving up the theatrical release to let it be released on the streaming platform. And what is interesting, horror movies seem to be the candle light to the darkness. It re-sparks the joy, excitement, and curiosity to get back to watching movies in the big screen culture.
Have a look at KKN di Desa Penari (originally planned to be released in March 2020, but postponed due to pandemic to 2022) and it comes very well as the all-time box office (10 millions audiences) in Indonesia. Also with the hype of Incantation (2022) in Taiwan, then all over the world with its release on Netflix. Both titles showed the human’s nature of exploring curiosity and temptation met with local rituals, respect, and redemption.
KKN di Desa Penari was originally adapted from the viral story of the same title in Twitter. It was claimed as a true story which happened in 2008. A friend of the writer’s mother was the main character of this story, who was a young college student from the city and went to a remote village with a group of friends to finish their social service internship. There, during the stay, conflict arose from the group’s objective to personal’s objective. Same as Incantation which was also inspired from an ominous incident in 2005, in the film, the director tried to put a group of youngsters in a foreign place where some orders later met disorders after they came, and similarly how the conflict began to be shared as personal’s objective. Both titles were trying to show the misbehaviour and recklessness of these youngsters due to lack of respect and knowledge, while also underestimating local rituals/beliefs.
Other patterns that can be seen from the last 10 years are the slowly shifting antagonist character from women to kids as the evil, ghost, or central of the story. Taking examples on The Tag Along Trilogy (Taiwan, 2015-2018), Pengabdi Setan 2 / Satan’s Slaves 2 (Indonesia, 2022), Bayi Ajaib (Indonesia, 2023 / a remake of the original 1982), Alena Anak Ratu Iblis (Indonesia, 2023), and Anak Titipan Setan (Indonesia, 2023).
Though the big theme is still strongly related to folklore, myths, urban and local legends, traditions or customs, superstitions, and adaptation of viral/real stories. In another layer, the addition of grassroots experience, local comedy, and language variety (e.g. mix of Taiwanese and Chinese (or ancient Chinese), Indonesian and Javanese (or other local and ancient language)) are put to make the story deeper, so people are hooked by the relevance, familiarity, and well-delivered proximity to locality.
Proving on how terror built and delivered by glance, with image guidance and dialog, the audiences found a connectedness to their daily life or personal experiences. Also quoting from Harun Farocki that “Cinema translates most sensation of touch into glances” – we mostly still can share the eeriness when the protagonist gets dragged away from the human world into the unknown with a leftover addiction in our heart.
Perhaps, this addiction fuels up the tendency of continuing the movie into sequels. Not just because it sells well and there are always more stories to develop. Sequels like Mangkujiwo 2 (2023), Keramat 2: Caruban Larang (2022), The Doll 3 (2022), Kuntilanak 3 (2022), Makmum 2 (2021) and The Rope Curse 2 (2020), The Rope Curse 3 (2023), The Bridge Curse 2 (2023) were made and I believe there are more to come. Finally, after all these formulas of fear cocktails, what will we get in the next 5 years?
[CHINESE]
[INDONESIA]
Terjemahan belum tersedia
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror or
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror was
an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s
1897 novel Dracula.
Detention, a horror adventure video game
Dreadout, a survival horror video game
