Malam Satu Suro (Indonesia, 1988)

It could be said that the length and breadth of Indonesian horror queen Suzzanna’s career was, to a certain extent, determined by the number of vengeful female spirits that could be found in Indonesian folklore. Fortunately for her, there were a lot. The Queen of the South Seas, the Snake Queen, the White Alligator Queen: Suzzanna played them all. And then, of course, there is Sundel Bolong, the “Ghost With Hole”. Malam Satu Suro comes along several years after the actress first portrayed that gruesomely perforated ghost in 1982’s Sundel Bolong, and shows signs of its makers -- including original Sundel Bolong director and longtime Suzzanna collaborator Sisworo Gautama Putra -- making an attempt to shake up the formula a little bit.

The Indonesian Wikipedia page for Malam Satu Suro suggests that it stands apart from other Sundel Bolong films by treating its lead ghost as its protagonist. However, as I’ve said elsewhere, it was not atypical for the spirits played by Suzzanna to be portrayed in a sympathetic light, in that the wrongs done them were often tragic in dimension and made their motives for revenge relatable to the audience. In Sundel Bolong, it is only the guilty who suffer her wrath, and once her vengeance is complete she is laid to rest once again. In Malam Satu Suro, things follow a similar trajectory, though it has to be said with a markedly increased laying on of bathos.

The film opens with a swell little scene set in a grave yard, in which an old shaman resurrects Sundel Bolong amid an array of exactly the type of rudimentary yet uniquely thrilling special effects we’ve come to count on from the Indonesians. After a cackling Suzzanna flies around on a pretty obvious wire for a bit, the shaman does a back flip and drives a spike directly into the top of her head. This causes the ghost to revert to her human form, that of Suketi, a ringer for the attractive Indonesian horror actress Suzzanna. Then, for reasons that were unclear to me, the shaman decides to make Suketi his adopted daughter.

Flash forward an indefinite amount of time later, and Bardo, a Jakarta businessman on a hunting expedition in the forest (and played by Fendi Pradana, who would also star opposite Suzzanna in the Indo martial arts fantasy Pusaka Penyebar Maut) stumbles upon Suketi and is instantly smitten. In fairly short order, Bardo convinces Suketi’s adoptive father of his intentions and the two are married amid a pageant of Javanese ritual dancing and weird fairy costumes.

Flash forward yet another indefinite, but likely longer, amount of time, and Bardo and Suketi’s lives are a model of upper middle class marital bliss, with two adorable moppets having been issued forth to complete the picture. To drive all of this home, Suzzanna sits down at the family piano and lip synchs a syrupy M.O.R. ballad as her husband and offspring look on adoringly. It all comes across like a particularly maudlin wedding video, but, as we’ve learned from previous Suzzanna films, the more idyllic the picture, the more tragically will it be rent apart.

And said renting indeed comes, in the form of a crooked business rival of Bardo’s, who, after consulting with a creepy, red-faced female Shaman, learns of Suketi’s former spectral guise. He and his goons then proceed to break into Suketi’s home in Bardo’s absence and pull the spike from her head. Once again, Suketi becomes Sundel Bolong, complete with the rotten, maggoty hole in her lower back that distinguishes her particular species of spook. She hangs around just long enough to freak the fuck out of her kids and their nanny, and then disappears into the night. However, the bad guys are not through, and later return to the house to murder the nanny and kidnap Suketi and Bardo’s youngest. A tense hostage drama follows, ending tragically when one of the kidnappers accidentally kills the child while trying to stifle his cries.

To be honest, throughout the movie’s kidnapping episode, it does feel like Suzzanna is getting kind of a superhero build-up. It’s as if Sundel Bolong is off ensconced in her Fortress of Solitude while, back in Metropolis, chaos takes reign. Every moment of her absence is one in which we anticipate her arriving at the nick of time to set things right with her maggot-eaten-hole-related super powers. Unfortunately, she doesn’t end up mobilizing until after her child has been killed, so her actions end up being, as usual, limited to payback. But first, she sits down once again at the family piano, now in her ghastly spectral form, to reprise that syrupy M.O.R. ballad from the beginning of the movie.

Now let me make clear that, while Suzzanna does interact with her family during this part of the movie, this is no heartwarming “My Wife, the Ghost With Hole” style TV friendly family portrait. As Sundel Bolong, Suzzanna is every bit her usual scary self, and perhaps even more so. The choice was made this time around to spackle her face with stark, kabuki style make up, which often changes dramatically in pattern from shot to shot, making for an effect that is memorably chilling. On top of this, when she finally does set out on her quest for vengeance, she digs up her child’s coffin and drags it along behind her, much like Franco Nero in Django, but to far more unsettling effect.

That said, the actual kill scenes in Malam Satu Suro, when they come, are noticeably antic, featuring a particularly gleeful and wisecracking Suzzanna. In this way, they’re reminiscent of the very Nightmare on Elm Street films that Putra and Suzzanna would later explicitly emulate in 1991’s Perjanjian Di Malam Keramat. There’s even a bizarre fantasy sequence that precedes the death of one baddie, an apparent John Lennon impersonator, who imagines himself singing before an adoring crowd and then turning into superman and flying around over their heads. In another scene, Sundel Bolong animates her dead child’s favorite teddy bear, making it march up to one prone perp and bloodily stomp his face in.

All of this leads up to a classic, only-in-Indonesia finale: A duel with the red-faced female shaman that sees her transforming into a person-sized suitmation frog as a cackling Suzzanna -- now turned into a leak -- flies around crazily above. Once this battle has concluded, Malam Satu Suro tries to again ratchet up the pathos for a last tearful moment between Sundel Bolong and her surviving family, but I doubt it could leave any but dry eyes in any house it played. In the end, the film only distinguishes itself from the original Sundel Bolong by how it flat out whups you upside the head with its tragic aspects, whereas, in the former, those aspects felt more organic and, as a result, more legitimately affecting. Sure, it’s possible to make a sad movie about a flying ghost lady with a rotting hole, but adding treacly power ballads and Vaseline-lensed romantic interludes will only make it… well, something different. Amazingly, though, that something different is still pretty entertaining.

Ghost of Guts Eater (Thailand, 1973)

The Krasue, as it's called in Thailand, is a horror found throughout the folklore of Southeast Asia. In Indonesia it's know as the Leak, in Cambodia as the Ap, and, in the Philippines, as Manananggal. Its presence is just as prominent in the cinema of the region, with probably its most widely known representation being in that Indonesian monument to all that is bizarre and lysergic, Mystics in Bali.

At least up until the present day, the special effects used to portray the Krasue on screen have been crude, but the very idea of it is unsettling enough for the creature to lose none of its power despite that. That fact puts a humble film like Ghosts of Guts Eater miles ahead of the vast majority of horror films produced today, most of which seem too preoccupied with putting shiny, state-of-the-art pavement over the same well traveled roads to even aspire to being scary on any deeper conceptual level.

Ghosts of Guts Eater, somewhat jarringly, wastes absolutely no time in introducing us to the Krasue, giving us an explicit close up of the spirit in all its gruesome glory during the film's opening frames. For those unfamiliar, what we see is an airborne female head -- in this case of an old woman -- with its complete digestive tract, intestines included, dangling freely beneath it as it sails menacingly through the night sky. It seems that this particular Krasue has been raiding the local chicken coops for food, and, as the film opens, a group of torch wielding villagers are bearing down on it, determined to put a stop to its poultry poaching activities.

In the ensuing melee, the Krasue is mortally wounded, but manages to wing its way back to the home of its host body, which belongs to the elderly grandmother of Bua Klee (Pisamai Vilaisakoi), a comely young village girl. Bua Klee, who is unaware of her nan's freaky nocturnal wanderings, comes upon the dying old woman once she has managed to get herself all reattached. Claiming to have been attacked by a prowler, her grandmother, as a last wish, gives to Bua Klee a ring which she asks her to wear at all times. Not surprisingly, this ring is later revealed to be the medium through which the older woman's spirit will call to Bua Klee, beckoning her to also roam the night as a Krasue in order to feed grannie's insatiable hunger.

While chicken will apparently do in a pinch, what the Krasue really hungers for is babies, and the younger the better. As legend has it -- and as Mystics in Bali so boldly depicted -- they're even not above eating them straight from the womb when the opportunity presents itself. Thus, on Bua Klee's freshman flight as a Krasue, she finds herself drawn to a fresh placenta that, in keeping with certain Thai traditions, is being kept in a container at the foot of the bed of a newborn's parents. Unfortunately for Bua Klee, the couple awakes before she can chow down, and they are able to shoo her away, leaving Bua Klee to fly off into the night hungry. (Amusingly, the village folk in Ghost of Guts Eater treat the Krasue less like some unspeakable horror from the supernatural world, and more just like a common nuisance of rural living, like an invading bat or raccoon.) Meanwhile, Muang, Bua Klee's husband, begins to suspect something is amiss when he awakes to find his wife sleeping sans her head.

Muang is played by Sombat Methanee, who was the top male star in Thailand at the time -- and whom many could be forgiven for thinking was the only male star in Thailand at the time, given just how often he turns up in these movies. Methanee was famous primarily as a hero of action films, yet here, though garnished with a couple fight scenes in which he can show his stuff, his is a relatively low key co-starring role that serves as a testament to the versatility required by his ubiquity. Like so many Southeast Asian horror films based in local folklore -- and I'm thinking in particular of those many Indonesian films starring Suzzanna -- Ghost of Guts Eater is largely a woman's story, with the tragic Bua Klee at it's center, and Methanee's Muang for the most part relegated to the part of helpless witness and beleaguered albeit loyal spouse.

To this end, Muang manages to convince himself that his encounter with the headless Bua Klee was just a dream. Yet his denial becomes harder to maintain once the young couple who were the victims of her previous night's attack identify Bua Klee as the Krasue. After a disastrous attempt at an exorcism by a local doctor, and with the townsfolk increasingly turning against them, Muang and Bua Klee take to the road, eventually finding shelter with a relative in another village. At which point Bua Klee's without-a-body experiences continue.

Ghost of Guts Eater takes place in a world in which the supernatural is a commonplace and accepted part of everyday life. Thus, in addition to negotiating the potential pitfalls of a marriage in which one party spends part of her time as a flying, entrails-trailing, disembodied head, Bua Klee and Muang also encounter, in the course of their travels, a cyclopean demon with a hidden treasure and a beautiful young woman who manages to hex Muang with a love spell. Most stirringly, Bua Klee finds that she has, by pursuing her activities as a Krasue in her new surroundings, invaded the air space of a rival Krasue, who hunts for fetuses alongside her husband, a flying demon. This leads to an aerial battle between the two that ends with Bua Klee chomping the other right on her exposed colon. Needless to say, it is a scene that I will remember and cherish for the rest of my life.

If you have never seen one of these old, folklore based, Southeast Asian horror films, Ghost of Guts Eater will no doubt be a source of much novelty and astonishment. If you have, well, I have good news, because there is much to recommend Ghost of Guts Eater nonetheless. The film forgoes the meditative pacing and jarring comic interludes typical of other Thai horror films of its era and, while a bit episodic, gives us a narrative that coasts along at a brisk and engaging pace. Further encouraging our involvement is a sympathetic portrayal of its monster -- again, not uncommon for these types of films -- that nonetheless preserves its viscerally horrifying nature. Lastly, the special effects, while primitive, range from charming to eerily evocative, and director S. Nawaraj elsewhere provides visuals that make handsome use of the colorful palette with which vintage Thai cinema has become so inseparably associated.

In short, Ghost of Guts Eater is a bit of a gem, and one that I would recommend to anyone who can stomach the idea of a woman's head flying around with its guts out. I'd think that wouldn't be too much to ask, as most of the people in Ghost of Guts Eater don't seem to be too repulsed by the thing's nasty appearance, and instead appear to regard it as a particularly annoying and persistent household pest.