FrightFest Halloween review – Setan Alas! (The Draft!)

FrightFest Halloween review – Setan Alas! (The Draft!)

At one point in writer-director Yusron Fuadi’s Setan Alas! (The Draft!) – which is the onscreen title, in two languages – a screenwriter who has been scribbling a scenario for an Indonesian horror film is told that he can easily be fired and replaced by Joko Anwar, the auteur of Impetigore and probably the only creative in the Indonesian horror scene who has any kind of international reputation so far.  However, it’s important to this movie that the audience realises there have been quite a few Indonesian horror films dating back to the 1970s with a recent mini-boom … Anwar’s Satan’s Slaves films derive from a 1980 hit of the same name, for instance.  Of course, Indonesian horror films draw a lot on Western sources with which fans will be familiar, and it’s easy to tag Fuadi’s movie as the Indonesian take on the post-modern meta theme of Cabin in the Woods.

Several times, the bespectacled nerd character lists all the elements of an Indonesian horror film present here … five stereotype students visiting a haunted Dutch villa in the remote countryside, a sinister caretaker, vinyl records, tragic backstories, cheap colour grading, a Dutch graveyard (you see this in a lot of Asian films – in cultures where cremation is the norm, spooky graveyards have to be colonial leftovers so you can have zombies and vampires), flying severed heads (not enough), etc.  The charade works well enough as a playful old house body count picture, though I have a sense I’m missing a lot of local-specific jokes about who these people are and the way they talk.  The mystery is about just how this is being meta, which is hinted at by the title and let slip early on with the characters doing their best to break out of the cliché ruts dug for them – and the script retaliating by throwing surprises (and a horde of zombies) at them.  I like the girl who reasons no one who writes dialogue this bad will find a producer willing to pay for three thousand extras so the zombie horde isn’t likely to be overwhelming.