Impetigore

• Made on a budget under $1 million as an Indonesian-Korean-American co-production (Rapi Films and BASE Entertainment with CJ Entertainment and Ivanhoe Pictures), the project was first announced in 2011, then shelved for roughly seven years - Joko Anwar later blamed trouble finding a filming location and a lack of budget - before the financing finally came together for a 2018 revival.
• It opened atop the Indonesian box office with about 117,000 admissions across 300 screens its first weekend, went on to roughly 1.7 million admissions and a domestic gross near Rp 71.8 billion (about $5.13 million), and ranked among the highest-grossing local films of its year (the 7th highest-grossing domestic release of 2019).
• Indonesia selected the film (Indonesian title Perempuan Tanah Jahanam, 'Woman of the Damned Land') as its official submission for Best International Feature Film at the 93rd Academy Awards - the country's first horror title ever sent to the Oscars - though it was not nominated.
• It had its international premiere in the Midnight section of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and also screened at Rotterdam and Gothenburg, an unusual festival reach for an Indonesian genre picture.
• The wayang kulit puppetry that drives the village's mythology is a deliberate plot mechanism, not just texture: 'kulit' literally means 'skin' (or leather), which ties directly to the curse's central horror - the murdered girls' flayed skin was fashioned into the shadow puppets, and burying those puppets is what breaks the curse.
• Joko Anwar reunited with Tara Basro, who anchors the film as Maya (revealed to be born Rahayu), alongside Ario Bayu as the village dalang Ki Saptadi, veteran Christine Hakim as Nyi Misni, Marissa Anita as Maya's friend Dini, and Asmara Abigail as Ratih, leaning on practical prosthetic gore over digital enhancement.

The curse isn't supernatural punishment so much as bookkeeping. The skinless births are the village's debt coming due for the flayed girls whose remains were turned into puppets and never buried. Read that way, the dalang's shadow-puppet plays aren't entertainment, they're the only honest ledger the village keeps, performing the crime back to itself night after night because nobody will say it out loud.

Maya is the village's original sin walking back in the door. She survived because three other children's skin was harvested to give her a body, which makes the villagers' hostility less mob superstition and more a community staring at the living proof of what they bought their children's lives with. The horror is communal guilt that needs a face, and she's it.

The opening stalker who dies whispering about her past frames the whole film as inheritance you can't refuse. Maya goes looking for property and instead inherits a curse, a body count, and a bloodline, the movie's argument being that what your family did to survive becomes literally your skin whether you consent to it or not.

Broke and stalked by a man who knows her name before he dies trying to kill her, Maya chases a rumor of inheritance back to the ancestral village she was carried out of as a baby. What waits there isn't a house and some land. It's a settlement of villagers whose children are born skinless, a community convinced the curse traces straight to her bloodline, and a dalang whose shadow-puppet shows double as the village's record of what was done to fix it. The dead want their skin back. Maya, born Rahayu, was the reason it got taken.