Impetigore

We jump back into international horror with Joko Anwar’s 2020 Indonesian folk-horror hit, Impetigore, a Shudder release that earned major festival acclaim and became Indonesia’s Oscar submission.

We talk about how the film’s Jakarta-to-remote-village setup builds atmosphere, the boldness of its dialogue and staging, and the gorgeous candlelit cinematography inspired by shadow puppetry.

Along the way we unpack the twisty mystery, the curse at the heart of the village, and the film’s disturbing violence, including the skinning and the chilling connection between human skin and puppet-making. We also debate the movie’s big exposition dumps, its cultural specificity, and why—subtitles and all—it’s still a compelling, well-made horror story worth seeking out.

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Impetigore (2019)

Episode 491, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast

Todd: Hello and welcome to another episode of Two Guys and a Chainsaw I’m Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: Well, uh, we go from a request to an international horror film. I don’t think we do enough of these, honestly. There’s a lot of good horror happening outside of the US and, uh, the UK and stuff, and, uh, we tend to focus a little bit on the Western side.

And there are countries out there such as Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, that are well known for being longtime rabid fans of horror movies and have long histories of doing horror movies back to, like, the ’60s and ’70s. I think the last Indonesian horror movie we did, which was also our first Indonesian horror movie we did, was Satan’s Slaves back in 2023 By Joko Anwar, who is one of these directors who snuck into a cinema when he was really, really young, saw a horror movie, was really, really scared by it, and inspired for the rest of his life, wanted to be a director, and specifically wanted to approach cinema from the language of horror.

He was just… And he’s been very successful since then. Satan’s Slaves was a pet project of his. Gosh, I think when we did that, I was actually reporting from Jakarta w- with my, uh, then Indonesian girlfriend, now recently ex-girlfriend. Here we are revisiting this. It, it’s kind of a shame really that Liz is not here to give her perspective on this because, uh, this, this one that we’re doing now, Impetigore, which came two films later for Joko Anwar, is very, very steeped in Indonesian culture.

Satan’s Slaves was a movie that… It was a remake actually of a movie from the ’70s, I believe, or ’80s, that he saw that he really, really loved and, and it was like a pet project for him to finally get that remade. After he had a few successful films under his belt, he was able to do that. This one is a complete original written and directed by him, and it was released in 2020.

Sundance, got very, very good reviews. It was actually a contender. It was Indonesia’s official submission for the Oscars for the international category, and it’s not often a horror movie gets, gets submitted for that.

Craig: Right.

Todd: Uh, it didn’t win, but it got lots of acclaim at other film festivals. It has like a 92% rating at Rotten Tomatoes.

It seems like this movie obviously was a big hit in its home country, and wh- where it premiered in the US and Canada, the UK I think, was on Shudder. Following the success of Satan’s Slaves, which was one of their biggest hits, they decided to collaborate with Anwar a bit more and, uh, so Impetigore was released there.

And so I think that’s where most people are gonna be able to see it now. Uh, I’ve got a short list of Joko Anwar movies I want us to do, and so I’m glad we could finally come to this one. I hadn’t seen it before. How about you, Craig?

Craig: No. I’m sure I had… Y- you know, ’cause I, I pay for Shudder, and I scroll through it periodically, and I’m sure that I saw it there.

As you know, these days I’m not particularly drawn to foreign language films unless there’s a dub, and there’s not for this, I don’t, I don’t think.

Todd: You had to read. Sorry, the English teacher had to read.

Craig: Well, to be honest with you, this one, especially in the first half of the movie, less so in the second half, but in the first half of the movie, there’s quite a bit of talking, and it goes by very quickly.

Todd: Yeah.

Craig: So you really have… You really do have to keep your eyes on the subtitles- More than I typically would like. True. But whatever. I mean, I, I still knew what was going on, a- as much as I was meant to, I think. I also think there may have been a couple wonky translation things. Minor, minor things. But no, I hadn’t watched it before, and, and I’m glad.

You know, this, the podcast gives me motivation to see these movies that I probably wouldn’t just watch on my own. Alan’s certainly not gonna watch- … a subtitled movie abso- with me. Absolutely not. Not a horror movie, anyway. So I’m, I’m glad to have had the opportunity to watch it, and I think it’s, it’s worth watching.

One of the things that I like about these foreign films is I, I think that yes, they’re often steeped in a culture that I’m not particularly familiar with. So I don’t know what is real and what’s entirely fiction, but it is nice to kind of see different parts of the world and, and these stories, at least the foreign films that we’ve done, typically have original plot lines and interesting things going on that you haven’t seen a bazillion times over.

I mean, this movie shares similarities to some things like Wicker Man. I, I felt like it was l- like, it like those folk horror movies. Absolutely. And it may strictly be because it’s foreign, but also there’s focus on the gore. The plot lines are not at all similar, but it also reminded me, ugh, it’s escaped me.

What’s that controversial movie that they skin a girl at the end so that she can have, like, a transcendental experience?

Todd: Oh, uh, Martyrs. Martyrs.

Craig: Martyrs, yeah. Shades of that. Shades of lots of things. Yeah. I mean, shades of Hostel 2, if you wanna get right down to it. True. But still, still an original story that I was invested in, and I liked the way that, uh, I liked the pacing of it and the way that it played out.

I, I, I was entertained.

Todd: Well, you know, I was reading some interviews with some of the, with the director, and one of the things that surprised him was how well it was received internationally because he said, “You know, I, I didn’t shoot this for an international audience. I shot it for an Indonesian audience, and there’s a lot of Indonesian culture in here.”

And so he kinda wondered how that would translate and come across. And sort of like you said, there’s just a lot of common themes here. It is at heart, in a way A typical ghost story in that there’s a ghost, th- they have something that needs to be done in order to banish them or solve the curse or whatever like that, and that, and that kind of happens.

So in that way, it’s very similar. But in other ways, you know, this is very much taking place in Indonesia. You know, the, the two ladies start out this movie in Jakarta as tollbooth operators, and then we end up in a very, very remote village, which is very common. Indonesia, by the way, is a huge country.

It’s made up of tons of islands, and I don’t know if you realize this, many people don’t, it’s the fourth largest country in the world by population. No, I didn’t know that. Yeah. So it’s a, it’s a pretty big country, and it’s got a lot of different languages, a lot of different cultures in it. So it’s a, it’s a really interesting place.

It’s got a very, very rich history and a lot of rich folklore as well, and that’s what he drew from. But also, he’s put in this movie some things that you wouldn’t normally see in Indonesian cinema, like this dialogue at the beginning in the tollbooth between these two ladies. It’s just so casual, really, that, that …