Horror movies save Indonesia's film industry

Indonesia's passion for horror films has stopped the film industry from dying. In 2024, horror films made up 60 percent of all the country's movies, which is 70 percent of ticket sales. That's 54.6 million tickets.

According to Sinematek Indonesia, the country's film datacentre, only 456 films were made between 1990 and 2000. Of those, just 37 were horror movies. However, these days, a quarter of Indonesia's productions are horrors. In 2023, the industry achieved the Guinness World Record for creating the greatest percentage of horror films.

A deep cultural tradition of supernatural tales with ghosts and monsters has influenced the Indonesian movie business. The film plots often include these ancient stories. Even so, for Ekky Imanjaya, a Film Studies professor, these movies can attract wider audiences.

Ekky Imanjaya: "Indonesian fil-, horror films, they offer a 'glocal' approach. 'Glocal' means local in story but global in cinematic language-, languages. So in, as in, you know, so, the western people, they understand what happens because we have the same film, film languages."

The films have been a big hit with cinema-goers in other parts of Asia, such as Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei. Indonesia also set up its own film market in 2024. This allows local producers to advertise and sell, possibly to the West. And film director Anggy Umbara expects the industry to become bigger and bigger.

Anggy Umbara: "Indonesian cinema can be accepted all over the world. I mean, it's starting at the moment. It's starting to rise at the moment. I mean, like, our movies are already wanted in Southeast Asia, in Asia. Some of them are travelling to the western world. And we hope that our audience getting bigger and bigger."

Indonesian horror films are bringing economic benefits too. Experts are predicting a very positive future as the movie business, in particular horror, comes out of the dark. View Less