31 Nights of Halloween Horror - Night 22 - Satan's Slaves

Satan’s Slaves

107 mins.

Dir. Joko Anwar

2017/Indonesia

Holy shit do I have a treat for you tonight.  One of the scariest films you have never seen and need to see.  Like Ghosts?  Like Satanic Cults?  Like Zombies?  This one has it all and remains to be creepy as fuck throughout.  Tonight we head to Southeast Asia and become Satan’s Slaves.

Set in 1981, this film is actually a remake of another Indonesian film of the same name made in 1987, which is kind of take on the film Phantasm.  Also not to be confused with the 1977 British film of the same title. This film really has nothing to do with Phantasm or the 70's flick.  Mother was a singer, her family consisting of mother, father, grandmother, older sister, and three brothers, youngest who is mute have been surviving off of mother’s royalty checks.  However the checks stopped coming and mother has been dying from a mysterious disease for the last three months which has now taken a turn for the worse.  Once mother finally passes, and let me tell you this woman is so damn creepy looking it looks like she already passed.  Kind of reminiscent of that creepy old lady dying in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath tale “The Drop of Water”.  After Mother dies, the family has no income, so father heads off to the city to try and procure some work, leaving the kids to fend for themselves.  Once father leaves, creepy shit really starts to happen in the house.  Either mother’s ghost is haunting the shit out of the family or something that has taken the form of their mother is doing it.  Regardless it is enough to get anyone to get the fuck out.  This place makes Amityville look like a summer home.

After doing a little investigating, they find out that mother had some problems giving birth, so she looked for help from a Satanic Fertility Cult.  It’s Indonesia just go with it.  Payment for the SFC to help you out is, on the youngest child’s 7^th birthday the cult comes to collect.  So what does mom do?  Every seven years she pops out a new kid so there is always someone younger to protect the child who is turning 7.  But with Mom getting sick, poor mute Ian never got a younger brother so the SFC has come to collect.  Which pretty much means they are going to scare the shit out of you in doing so, I mean they are Satanists after all.

The scares come fast and furious in the film, there is very little downtime between the next set up.  Seems like all these people do is sleep as they are constantly woken up in the middle of the night, ya know, cause that is when the creepy shit happens.  I will say a lot of the scare are jump scares and you always know they are coming with the ominous music that starts.  But some of them of pretty damn effective.  Especially probably one of the scarier scenes which simply involves trying to throw a white sheet over a painting.

This movie is not without its faults.  Remember this is Indonesia in the 80s, so some of the superstitions are a little silly and people seem to buy right into them as fact, which apparently in this movie they are.  Some of the scares are either cheap jump scares or scares we have seen before elsewhere, but that does not make them any less effective.  I am going to strongly recommend this one to anyone looking for a fright, not the scariest ever but a fun time being scared, it never really drags.

I’ve watched some pretty awesome new movies that have come out over the last few years so far this month and I have to say they have all been overseas and subtitled and on Shudder.  If you are a horror fan and don't subscribe, you are blowing it.  You don’t know what you are missing if you ignore any of these.  Wake up America!  Start making some good horror flicks again.