Satan's Slaves

Snapshot

Satan's Slaves (Pengabdi Setan) is Joko Anwar's reimagining of Sisworo Gautama Putra's 1980 Indonesian horror film of the same title. Both versions were produced by Rapi Films. It is set in 1981 in a decaying family house on the rural edge of Java. A once-famous singer, bedridden for three years with an illness no one can name, dies. Her husband leaves for the city to find money, and her four children and their grandmother stay behind in the house. Then the mother seems to come back.

The film was a large commercial hit at home. It was the top-grossing Indonesian film of 2017 and, at the time, the most-watched Indonesian horror film on record, with admissions reported at more than four million. It also travelled abroad through festival screenings and streaming; in North America it went to the horror platform Shudder. Critics generally read it as the film that brought Indonesian horror back from a long run of cheap, exploitative productions. It showed that the genre could be made with real craft, a sense of period and narrative control, and still fill cinemas. It led to a sequel, Satan's Slaves 2: Communion (2022), and to a wider franchise built around its cult mythology.

Industry & production

The original Pengabdi Setan (1980) was one of Rapi Films' best-known horror titles. It came from the New Order era's commercial genre industry, which also produced the Suzzanna cycle. Anwar has said many times that the 1980 film frightened him as a child and had stayed with him since. He had wanted to remake it for years before Rapi Films agreed. The producers named in the credits are associated with Rapi's Samtani family.

The 2017 film was co-produced with CJ Entertainment, the South Korean conglomerate that was investing in Southeast Asian productions during this period. The partnership is a sign of a regional trend in which Korean capital and distribution backed genre films in Indonesia, Vietnam and elsewhere. It gave the production more resources than were typical for Indonesian horror in the 2010s. Production budget figures are not reliably documented in English-language sources, and none is given here.

The film opened in Indonesian cinemas in late September 2017. Strong word of mouth kept it running for weeks, and it kept adding screens. Its success came during a broader expansion of Indonesian theatrical exhibition, with new multiplexes in second-tier cities. Industry commentary at the time often cited it as proof that local genre films could compete with Hollywood releases at home.

Technology

The film was shot digitally. It does not depend on new technology. Instead it applies a polished production toolkit — controlled camera movement, careful period lighting and designed sound — to a genre that in Indonesia had often lacked those resources. Visual effects are used sparingly, mostly for apparitions and a few set-piece moments. Much of the horror comes from practical makeup, staging in deep space, and the timing of what the camera shows.

Diegetic period technology is central to how the film builds dread. The mother's bell, the turntable playing her record, the radio, and a household with uncertain electricity are all scare devices that belong to the setting. Old media keep a dead voice alive inside the home. The sequel would later become the first Indonesian film released in IMAX. The first film has no such format ambitions.

Technique

Cinematography

The cinematographer is Ical Tanjung, one of Anwar's regular collaborators. He shoots the house as a dim, warm space: tungsten and oil-lamp tones, deep shadows in the corners, and long hallways that recede into darkness. The camera often moves slowly and deliberately, with lateral tracking, creeping push-ins, and pans that pass an empty doorway and come back to find it occupied. These patterns ask the viewer to search the frame.

Many frames are composed with a figure in the foreground and an uncertain shape or gap behind. This lets Anwar build suspense out of off-centre negative space instead of cuts. The palette is faded and slightly sepia, which suggests the look of an early-1980s photograph without becoming pastiche. Daylight exteriors are washed out and bleak. They offer little relief.

Editing

The editing is patient by the standards of contemporary commercial horror. Shots are allowed to run so that tension builds before a release comes, and the film uses jump scares but rations them. It is also willing to hold a long beat in which nothing happens, which unsettles the audience's expectations.

Several sequences are built on repetition and variation. The bell rings, someone goes to the mother's room, and the room or its occupant has changed. This rhythm turns familiar household routines into a source of fear. The final act speeds up sharply, cutting between siblings scattered through the house as the siege by the dead begins.

Mise-en-scène / staging

The house is effectively the film's main set and one of its main characters. The production designer, Allan Sebastian, as far as available credits indicate, fills it with heavy colonial-era furniture, worn wallpaper, a well in the yard, family photographs and religious objects. Together these suggest a middle-class family in decline. The mother's room, with her bed, bell and vanity, is the centre of the house's dread.

Anwar stages scares around domestic objects: a sheet drawn over a body, the gap under a bed, a figure seated with its back to the camera, a child's view from low in the frame. The mother's look draws on 1970s–80s Indonesian horror iconography. She has long dark hair, a white or pale nightgown and a gaunt, ashen face. The design links her to the kuntilanak and pocong traditions without copying them directly. The pocong — a corpse wrapped in a burial shroud — appears explicitly in the climax.

Sound

Sound is central to the film's design. The mother's bell, which she rang from her sickbed to call her children, becomes the main motif. Each time it rings after her death, the family is summoned again. Her recording of the song "Kelam Malam" plays on the family turntable. It functions both as a diegetic artefact of her lost career and as a haunting voice from beyond death.

The score is by Aghi Narottama, Bembi Gusti and Tony Merle, the trio who have scored much of Anwar's work. It favours low drones and dissonant textures over melodic cues, and it often drops to near-silence before a scare. The film's sound and music work were recognised in the Citra Award craft categories. The full list of awards is better checked against the Festival Film Indonesia record than stated from memory here.

Performance

Tara Basro plays Rini, the eldest child, who becomes the family's acting head once her father leaves. She is the film's emotional anchor, playing a young woman worn down by responsibility and fear, and doing it with restraint. Bront Palarae, a Malaysian actor, plays the father as a man who is evasive and quietly carrying guilt. Ayu Laksmi, a Balinese singer and performer, plays the mother. She is frightening almost entirely through stillness and presence. Her background as a singer adds weight to the conceit of the recorded song.

The younger siblings are played by Endy Arfian (Tony), Nasar Annuz (Bondi) and M. Adhiyat (Ian, the youngest, who is deaf and communicates by signing). They are given real characterisation. Their bickering and small kindnesses make the family believable before it is attacked. Elly D. Luthan plays the grandmother. Egy Fedly plays the local ustad, whose authority proves inadequate, and Dimas Aditya plays his son, Hendra, who is drawn to Rini.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The film is a family-siege ghost story that gradually becomes a story about a cult. The first half follows a slow-burn haunting structure. The mother dies, the bell rings, the grandmother dies, and the children see apparitions. Throughout, the household is in money trouble and a father is absent, and both add to the strain.

In the second half, the film reveals its mythology through documents and testimony. The mother had been unable to conceive and joined a fertility cult. The price of her children was that one would be given to the cult on reaching seven years of age. Ian, the youngest, is the child who has been promised. The dead have come back to collect him.

This turn from ambiguous haunting to a named, conspiratorial evil follows a pattern found in Anglo-American occult horror, especially Rosemary's Baby. Anwar adapts it to Indonesian concerns. The climax is a night siege in which the dead rise. The film then ends with an epilogue that shows the cult still active and expanding its reach, which sets up the sequel. The tone is mostly earnest and mournful, with occasional dry humour from the siblings.

Genre & cycle

Satan's Slaves draws on two genre lineages. The first is Indonesian horror (film horor). Its first peak was the late-1970s and 1980s cycle led by Rapi Films and the actress Suzzanna, in which Islamic religious authority usually defeats a supernatural threat in the final act. Its second, much weaker phase came in the 2000s and early 2010s, when a flood of low-budget horror-comedies and sex-horror films damaged the genre's reputation.

The second lineage is the international "haunted family" film of the 2010s, especially James Wan's Insidious and The Conjuring films, with their period settings, rich period detail and choreographed scares. Anwar's remake sits deliberately where these two traditions meet.

The film's most-discussed change from the Indonesian formula is what happens to religious authority. In the 1980 original, faith and the ustad prevail. In 2017, the ustad is ineffective, and conventional piety does not protect the family. Critics and scholars have read this as a quiet but significant departure from the genre's earlier moral rules.

Authorship & method

Joko Anwar wrote and directed the film. A former film critic, he is one of the most recognisable auteurs in contemporary Indonesian popular cinema. Before Satan's Slaves he had made the romantic comedy Joni's Promise (2005), the noir Dead Time: Kala (2007), the psychological thriller The Forbidden Door (2009), Modus Anomali (2012) and the Jakarta romance A Copy of My Mind (2015). Across these films he is a genre cinephile who also comments on Indonesian society.

He works with a fairly stable team. Ical Tanjung shoots; Aghi Narottama, Bembi Gusti and Tony Merle score; and many of the same actors return across projects, Tara Basro above all. Editorial credits for this film are not recorded here with enough confidence to name them.

Anwar has described his approach to horror as rooted in his childhood fear of the original Pengabdi Setan. He also says he thinks classical horror should be taken seriously as a craft. That shows in the film's control of rhythm, its long setups and its unhurried build-up.

Movement / national cinema

The film belongs to the post-Reformasi Indonesian cinema that followed the end of the Suharto regime in 1998. That cinema has been marked by commercial revival, more independent voices and a looser, though still present, censorship regime. Within this field, Satan's Slaves is generally treated as a key work in the 2010s revival of quality Indonesian genre filmmaking.

That revival also includes Timo Tjahjanto and Kimo Stamboel (the Mo Brothers) and Gareth Evans's The Raid films. All of these have been distributed internationally as Indonesian genre cinema. Anwar's film showed that a mainstream horror film could appeal to the domestic mass audience and also earn international critical attention, without the action-cinema hook The Raid relied on.

Era / period

The film is set in 1981, during the height of Suharto's New Order. Anwar has said he chose the period partly to keep faith with the original and partly for the look and texture of the era. The setting does more than supply mood. The family's failing finances, the father's trips to the city to deal with debts, and the decaying house all point to a period of uneven development and class precarity.

Some critics have read the setting further, connecting the film's buried pacts, missing knowledge and returning dead to the New Order's suppressed histories. That reading is critical interpretation, not anything Anwar has explicitly stated, and it is offered here as such.

The film's own production period, 2016–17, saw a boom in Indonesian theatrical exhibition. It also saw a wider resurgence of period-set horror in global cinema.

Themes

• Motherhood, debt and sacrifice. The central revelation is that the children's lives were bought with a promise. The mother's love and her bargain cannot be separated. The film presents motherhood as both devotion and a debt that must be paid.
• The household as a trap. Domestic rituals — answering the bell, caring for a sick parent, sharing beds — become the channels through which horror enters. The family is haunted by its own intimacies.
• The failure of religious authority. The ustad's limits and the family's lapsed or ambiguous religious practice set up a debate, which the film does not fully resolve, about whether faith protects. This marks a clear break from Indonesian horror conventions of the 1980s.
• Inheritance and the past. Recorded music, family photographs, letters and old journalism carry knowledge forward from the dead. The past speaks through objects.
• Disability and the vulnerable child. Ian's deafness is used both to build suspense, since there are things he cannot hear, and as part of his characterisation within a family that communicates with him through sign. Critical discussion of how well the film handles this is limited.
• Patriarchal absence. The father leaves to resolve the family's problems and instead takes his secrets with him. He leaves his eldest daughter to carry the household.

Reception, canon & influence

Critical reception. Indonesian critics largely welcomed the film as a serious, carefully made horror film after years of disposable genre releases. International genre critics, reviewing festival screenings and the Shudder release, praised its atmosphere, period design, sustained dread and performances. Some reviewers found the final act's mythology and rush of revelations less controlled than the first half. Others felt its scare mechanics were too close to James Wan's work.

It received a large number of nominations at the 2017 Festival Film Indonesia (Citra Awards) and won in several craft categories. A precise count is best checked against the official FFI record. Its commercial run made it the top-grossing Indonesian film of its year.

Influences on the film (backward).

• The direct source is Sisworo Gautama Putra's Pengabdi Setan (1980). The 1980 film was itself often described as drawing on Don Coscarelli's Phantasm (1979), especially in its music and some imagery.
• The wider Rapi Films/Suzzanna horror tradition supplied its iconography of shrouded and long-haired ghosts.
• James Wan's The Conjuring (2013) and Insidious (2010) influenced its period haunted-house staging and set-piece construction.
• Rosemary's Baby (1968) and the occult-conspiracy tradition shaped the cult and fertility-pact structure.
• Classical haunted-house cinema such as The Others (2001) and The Innocents (1961) shows in its slow-burn ambiguity, although Anwar's specific debts to these films are a matter of critical inference.

Legacy (forward).

• Satan's Slaves 2: Communion (2022), also directed by Anwar, moved the cult mythology to a Jakarta apartment block in 1984. It was the first Indonesian film released in IMAX and was reported to have outperformed the first film at the domestic box office.
• The film changed what Indonesian producers believed horror could earn. It helped launch a sustained, ongoing horror boom in Indonesia, during which horror became one of the most commercially dominant genres in local cinema through the late 2010s and 2020s.
• It established Anwar as a leading genre filmmaker. His next horror film, Impetigore (Perempuan Tanah Jahanam, 2019), was selected for Sundance's Midnight section. He later made Grave Torture (Siksa Kubur, 2024) and was named to direct the Bumilangit superhero universe, beginning with Gundala (2019).
• Internationally, it is now one of the standard reference points, alongside work from Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia, for Southeast Asian horror's growing global visibility through streaming platforms in the late 2010s.

Its standing in the canon is still developing. Within Indonesian popular cinema, it is regularly cited as the defining horror film of its decade.