A king possessed by a spirit, his face covered in bleeding sores comes charging out with a knife in hand, holding it to the neck of a man."Cut," says a voice emanating from a tinny speaker.ABC's 7.30 travelled to the forests outside Indonesia's cultural hub of Yogyakarta to be on the set of Forbidden Camp, one of dozens of new horror films being produced this year in the country.
According to one film analyst, 51 of 108 local films screened in cinemas last year were horror movies.One film that has bucked the trend this year is Agak Laen, a comedy that surged to more than 9 million ticket sales, the second-highest of any Indonesian film in history."Horror movies have always been big in Indonesia, but back in the day most of them weren't good quality," said Derby Romero, an actor starring in Forbidden Camp, who has also directed films.
His horror film Grave Torture is among the top four box office films screening in cinemas so far this year. "Indonesians are into superstitions, mysticism, and supernatural things, that's why they come here," said Slamet Hariyanto, the coordinator of Wahana Hantu Indonesia, a company running three haunted houses.One of them, tucked in the corner of the fifth floor of a suburban shopping mall in East Jakarta, attracts a mixture of teenagers and older horror fans, who pay just two dollars each for the experience.