In October of 2019 I had the good fortune to attend and write about the first iteration of Halaloween, a production of the University of Michigan’s Global Islamic Studies Center. With so many good horror films coming from outside of the US in the last 20 plus years, a film festival providing exposure to horror films produced in the Muslim world had no problem finding an audience.
After the understandable setbacks prompted by Covid, I am happy to have the opportunity to report on the 2022 edition of Halaloween. Here is an overview of this year’s lineup:
Roh (Soul)/ 2019 / Malaysia
Roh is an exciting first feature by writer/director Emir Ezran. Together with cinematographer Saifuddin Musa he has created a visually rich and engrossing film that belies its modest ($88,500.00) budget. The results were so impressive that, despite the Oscars’ longstanding disdain for the horror genre, Roh was submitted as Malaysia’s entry for Best International Feature Film for the 2021 Academy Awards.
On its surface, Roh tells a simple story. A poor family of three lives alone in a one room jungle dwelling. The mother named Mak (Farah Ahmad) sends daughter Along (Mhia Farhana) and her younger brother Angah (Harith Haziq) out to check a trap. The children encounter two bizarre things. First, they see a dead deer dangling from a tree. Then, they are followed home by a bedraggled young girl caked in mud. The mother takes the child in, feeding and bathing her, believing that she is mute. She later shocks the family with a prophecy, announcing that they will all be dead before the next full moon. As strange portents and even stranger new characters appear, Mak and her family are left with only their traditional beliefs and folklore to puzzle out a way to survive.
Roh derives its power from the way that it establishes an ever-escalating sense of unease and dread as more bad things continue to happen to Mak and her family. Musa’s camera is often used for extremely slow gliding shots that capture the expanse of the jungle while highlighting the family’s isolation and frailty. The unhurried and quiet way that Ezran builds his scenes truly heightens the suspense.
It is good that Roh delivers so well on atmosphere because Ezran is not overly concerned with presenting a concise story. As Ezran states in an interview, “Our perception of reality is an incurable affliction.” He creates a symbology full of wonderful images that he does not bother to connect to a particular narrative. There are small blazing trees and dead bodies lying on the ground thinly covered with soil. And of course, there is that suspended deer. It evokes the image of a hanging goat found in the 1943 movie, I Walked With a Zombie from another low budget horror auteur, Val Lewton. But whatever we may take from these images, Ezran makes it clear that he wants the meaning of Roh to be completely open to individual interpretation.
Even though Ezran provides an ending that partially explains the devilry in play, many viewers may find Roh rather inscrutable. But it is also tense, very scary, and a worthy first entry to kick off Halaloween.
Satan’s Slaves (Pengabdi Setan) 2017 / Indonesia
Director Joko Anwar’s version of this story is actually a remake. The original was directed by Sisworo Gautama Putra in 1980. It reportedly made such an impact on Anwar as a young filmmaker that he nurtured dreams of someday presenting his take on it to a new audience. I have not yet seen the original, but Anwar’s version is an entertaining and fun horror movie that is definitely worth a watch.
The Suwono family (grandmother, mother, father, and four children) share a large house in Indonesia circa 1981. They have fallen on hard times. The mother, Mawarni, is in poor health and, early in the story, succumbs to an unknown disease. The father, Bahri, immediately leaves the children in the care of his 22-year-old daughter Rini so that he can try to find a way to save their home. Mawarni’s ghost starts appearing to the children in a series of frightening apparitions. But as the terrors build, the family discovers that Mawarni’s restless spirit may be the least of their problems.
Satan’s Slaves has a lot in common with the American hit from 1982, Poltergeist. Both films spend a lot of screen time establishing how lovable their main characters are. Rina is solid and responsible; 16-year-old Toni is the most well-adjusted teenager in Indonesia; 10-year-old Bondi and 6-year-old Ian are mischievous, but sweet. Bahri is a kind and loving father. As Spielberg does with the Freeling family in Poltergeist, Anwar makes sure that we care about what happens to the Suwonos. Besides inspiring empathy, this makes us feel the danger of the scary parts more acutely.
And there are plenty of scares to savor. A prayer session gone very wrong, a most unsettling encounter with a bed sheet, and the classic middle of the night pee run by a terrified six-year-old are but a few of the treats that Anwar has in store.
We eventually learn that earlier in life Mawarni solved some baby making issues by entering into a fertility pact with a devil cult. As part of the bargain, they are entitled to claim youngest child Ian on his upcoming 7th birthday. What this really provides is an excuse for Anwar to ramp up a big climax featuring a full-on assault on the Suwono family by a legion of demons. No spoilers on how the family makes out, but Anwar ends the movie with a jokey coda, perhaps to set up a sequel. (Note: I later learned that Anwar’s sequel, Satan’s Slaves: Communion was released in 2022.)
Satan’s Slaves is something of a throwback. It does not present pointed social critiques or uncover basic truths about the human condition. It simply wants to scare us. Rather than a descent into darkness, it is more like a ride on a Horror Tilt-a Whirl. Some scares, some fun, and you end up in one piece. This kind of movie when well done will always find a seat at the horror table.
Beddua: The Curse / 2018 / Turkey
Beddua: The Curse is another entry from the prolific Alper Mestci. He has directed ten horror films to date, including most of the movies in the popular Siccin series.
Melek, Burcu, Eda, and Ayla are girlfriends from high school. Three years ago, a strange occurrence left Melek paralyzed and unable to communicate. The details are murky, but the others blame a shamanistic woman known as Havel for Melek’s condition. The story picks up in the present as the 20-something Burcu, Eda, and Ayla are each being plagued by horrifying visions featuring Havel and a monstrous version of Melek. Is the curse that Melek may be experiencing spreading to them?
After introducing the three still ambulatory members of the group with cloying voiceover quotes from their high school yearbook, Mestci quickly settles into a rhythm. Melek’s friends remain supportive. She receives separate visits from Eda and Burcu trying to cheer her up. Burcu even gets her father to reinstate Melek’s dad, an employee whom her father had laid off. But Melek’s condition remains unchanged, and every kind or compassionate act by one of the young women is seemingly offset by another nightmarish horror.
What saves this pattern from becoming boring is Mestci’s deft use of the jump scare. It is his go-to device throughout the movie. He delivers them with such ferocity and excellent timing that, even though the audience soon begins to anticipate them, they always work. It is the film’s saving grace.
The story continues on a pretty conventional track until nearly the end of the movie. Here Mestci introduces a wild plot twist. I cannot engage in spoilers, but I can say that we learn that there actually is a curse, but it is nothing like what we were led to believe. Without getting into details, I must say that this did not work for me. Upending audience expectations is a time-honored technique in every film genre. But because events that are depicted in the story as true are later discarded completely in service of the movie’s big reveal, I felt like a victim of a bait and switch by the director.
Viewers with an affinity for the entertaining horror jolts that Mestci expertly delivers in Beddua: The Curse may enjoy this movie. But depending on how you process the film’s final act, I believe that your mileage may vary.
Saloum / 2021 (Senegal)
Saloum opens with a boy wading far out into a body of water holding a broken prisoner’s chain in one hand and a large pistol in the other. As the boy disappears beneath the water’s surface a voiceover says, “We say that revenge is like a river, whose bottom is reached only when we drown.”
While the meaning of this sequence remains a mystery until the end of the movie, director Jean Luc Herbulot charts a most interesting path to reveal it. Saloum is a taut exercise in genre shape shifting. What begins as a high energy heist thriller later becomes a very dark drama before morphing into a full-on horror film. At its core it remains a tale about the nature of revenge, and its ultimate futility.
After the mini-prologue we are abruptly dropped into the middle of a bloody coup in Guinea-Bissau where a group of three mercenaries known as Bagnui’s Hyenas abduct a Mexican drug lord along with a suitcase full of gold. They narrowly escape amidst a hail of bullets in their small plane. However, when they discover that their fuel tank has been damaged, they make an emergency stop in Sine-Saloum. This is where their leader, Chaka (a compelling performance by Yann Gael) grew up. He takes them to a kind of hostel where guests exchange labor for room and board. On the surface the plan is to lay low until they can repair the plane, dig up the buried gold, and continue to Dakar.
However, in Herbulot’s first change of course, we learn that the mercenaries have not ended up in Sine-Saloum by chance. Without giving too much away, I will say that Chaka has engineered their arrival so that he can take his revenge for the imprisonment and abuse that he suffered in Sine-Saloum as a child. At a camp communal dinner, tension is coming from all sides. We are introduced to the gloriously defiant Awa (the excellent Evelyne Ily Juhen). A deaf mute, she sees through the Hyenas’ con immediately, and signs to Chaka in front of the other guests that she will expose them unless they take her with them to Dakar. Then the overly friendly chief of police suspiciously shows up and grabs a seat. Later, in a bit of foreshadowing Chaka tells their ever-convivial host Omar that “You’ll be sick to death of us.”
I will be dancing around spoilers from here on. In a scene that is both incredibly tense and heart wrenching, Chaka does eventually exact his revenge. But before the gang can escape, Herbulot yanks the steering wheel once more. It turns out that Chaka’s victim had an unholy pact of protection with a supernatural entity whose powers are now unleashed to pick off the remaining survivors.
The film employs a neat reversal on the plot device from The Quiet Place. Instead of monsters who are aroused into action by sound, these creatures are whirling dervishes who emit sounds that, once heard, give them access to their victim’s bodies, which they quickly destroy from within.
Now a horror film, Saloum kicks into another gear. Relying more on non-stop action than slowly creeping dread, the last 40 minutes of the movie play like an extended chase scene as Chaka and company scramble for weapons and ear protection in an attempt to dodge their fates.
When Chaka and a few survivors finally make it to a small boat to make their escape, Herbolut springs his last surprise. It is here that the movie comes full circle and ties into the passage read at the start of the story, providing a satisfyingly powerful ending to both the film as well as to Halaloween 2022.
Halaloween 2022 was about much more than each movie’s country of origin. This year’s program also showcased films with a rich diversity of subject matter, theme, and stylistic approach. I hope that, public health permitting, we will be able to continue to enjoy more of this festival’s unique take on the horror genre.
About Rich Dishman – My fascination with horror began with a way inappropriately aged viewing of the Universal Frankenstein. It was an experience so terrifying yet so exhilarating that I have spent the rest of my movie going life trying to top it. I began writing movie reviews for Classic-Horror.com in 2010. Since its retirement in 2012, I have been a regular contributor at the multi-media British site, Contains Moderate Peril, and more recently for the horror website Ravenous Monster. I have a day job, but I am also a professional musician (well, drummer). I want to start a project to perform a repertoire consisting exclusively of soundtrack music from horror and sci-fi films. Is that weird? I live with my wonderful wife and two cats. They see and they know that I “wouldn’t even harm a fly.” Rich Dishman has previously written for Horror Homeroom about the 2019 Halaloween festival and on Val Lewton and Oz Perkins.
