Three childhood friends return to the orphanage where they were grew up to pay their respects to the dying director who raised them in Kimo Stamboel’s brutal and gory supernatural slasher The Queen of Black Magic (also known as Ratu Ilmu Hitam). This Indonesian import has no qualms dialing up the blood and guts as the screenplay from Joko Anwar (Impetigore) immediately sets its stock of characters up for encounters with dark magic, free-flying viscus and so. many. CGI. bugs.

Stamboel approaches horror with a simple philosophy: work the scares and get the blood flowing. Whereas some directors approach the genre with a scalpel, Stamboel kicks down the door swinging a meat cleaver, eager to hack his band of characters into ribbons of flesh in the most grotesque, bloody-murder-scream-inducing ways possible. It’s extreme but for those willing to bear it, his approach is the perfect fit for the material.

Ario Bayu is Hanif. Once an orphan, he now has a family of his own, including a beautiful wife Nadya (Hannah Al Rashid) and three children and their three children Sandi (Ari Irham), Dina (Adhisty Zara) and Haqi (Muzakki Ramdhan). Though he’s taken great pains to keep his past behind him, Hanif’s return to the orphanage where he was raised brings everything crashing down around him as evil sorcery turns this innocent farewell to a beloved father figure into a trip to a haunted evil witchland.

Although it shares the same name with the 1981 film The Queen of Black Magic, this modern telling is more a spiritual remake than direct adaptation, much like 2013’s update to Evil Dead. The film shares a similar sense of exploitative go-for-broke madness, loading all kinds of jet black over-the-top antics into the frame including school buses of dead kids, flesh-eating bugs, headless witches, and a good measure of human immolation.

The brutality is extreme and excessive enough to satisfy the blood-thirstiest of horror fans but with enough winking camp to lend The Queen of Black Magic a touch of good humor. While many of the horror movies I’ve watched recently have failed to instill a real sense of fear, The Queen of Black Magic passes the scare test, leaving audiences a bit shaken by the sheer extremity onscreen (as I discovered for myself nervously shuffling through my dark house a few hours later.)

Those with a sensitive stomach may want to skip out as there are no small occurrences of ultra-violence including violence towards children, self-mutilation, violence towards women, cracked bones, burned bodies, and disturbing instances of self-harm. Oh and did I mention all the bugs? That the characters are thinly written and the plot relies on putting them in harm’s way more than telling a truly original story almost doesn’t matter. Anwar’s tale of reckoning with past mistakes leans into the brutality and frights to deliver a nerve-wracking and palpably deranged horror show. And that’s all I really wanted or needed from this.

CONCLUSION: With ‘The Queen of Black Magic’, Indonesian horror cranks the savagery and blood-thirst up to new gut-churning levels. Though the film from Kimo Stamboel revels in the gore, Joko Anwar’s script keeps things just grounded enough to invest audiences in the human element.

B

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