31 Days of Halloween 2018: Satan's Slaves

2017, Joko Anwar (Ritual) -- Shudder

OK, this is weird. I did not know that this movie was a remake of a 1980 movie of the same name, but it explained why the movie decided to take place in the 80s. What do you mean, Toasty? Lots of horror movies choose to be set in other periods. What I mean is that usually a current movie chooses a previous time period in order to reflect something of that time period. Some want to draw upon something that era held dear, such as television psychics. Some are just period, as haunted Victorian houses are just a thing. And some like the lack of ubiquitous technology. This one, unless I am lacking in my understanding of culture in Indonesia in the 80s, just chose to be retro, with no real tie to the past beyond the origin movie. No matter, it worked.

This is a complicated movie about a dying matron and the family losing everything in their care of her. It begins with the death of said matron, and how the family deals with her death, in both the release of the burden of taking care of her and the additional financial difficulty it adds. But everyone is dedicated as family should be. But things start getting weirder, with apparitions and poltergeist attacks. Rini, the daughter, starts digging into the family's past to discover a connection to a strange cult of Satanic worshippers.

I imagine much of the impact of this movie depends on remembering its originator, but to the foreign eye and it all being new, it still held up mostly to me. It was eerie and mixed the ghost and cult aspects well, dispensing with many of the tropes I expected. It reminded me of many of the horror movies from this blog's heyday (do we have one?) which were drawing upon the styles of horror movies in the 80s, but only thinly so. It did not depend on them but remembered them fondly.