Satan's Slaves

• Produced by Rapi Films, the studio that dominated Indonesian genre filmmaking in the era, and directed by Sisworo Gautama Putra from a script he co-wrote with Naryono Prayitno and Imam Tantowi.
• The film was nearly impossible to see outside Indonesia for decades, surviving mainly as a subtitle-less Japanese VHS bootleg until a U.S. label, Brentwood Home Video, finally gave it an uncut DVD release in 2006.
• Fans and critics nicknamed it 'the Indonesian Phantasm' for its funeral-heavy, graveyard-and-motorbike atmosphere and cheap-genre reputation, though the actual Tall Man, dwarves, and silver spheres from Don Coscarelli's film are nowhere in it — the comparison is mostly vibe, not plot.
• The film is widely credited with reshaping Indonesia's genre-film industry, helping cement Islamic-themed possession and weak-faith horror as a durable commercial formula through the 1980s.
• Joko Anwar's 2017 follow-up, released internationally as the pluralized 'Satan's Slaves' (versus the original's singular 'Satan's Slave'), became the best-selling Indonesian film of that year and the highest-grossing horror movie in the country's history, with more than 4.2 million admissions.
• Severin Films sourced a new 2K restoration from the original negative, which had its international premiere at the 2019 Fantasia International Film Festival before a full Blu-ray release in 2020.

The film reads as a parable about a wealthy, secularizing family: Munarto's total immersion in business and the kids' drift into nightlife and Western dating rituals is itself what leaves the house exposed — Darminah doesn't punish one specific sin, she preys on a household that quietly stopped protecting itself once faith became optional.

Munarto's refusal to act until his children force his hand reads as more than grief-numbed denial — he's the one family member who never once suggests calling on religion for help, suggesting his own quiet lapse, not just his wife's death, is what actually cracked the door for Darminah.

Darminah walking in as 'the help' and being accepted into the house with zero vetting works as a class critique as much as a horror device — the family's comfort insulates them from ever questioning a stranger sent to run their household, and that blind trust in domestic labor is exactly what lets the demon in the front door.

When Mawarti dies from a strange illness that's been eating at her for months, her husband Munarto buries himself in work while the kids fall apart their own ways — daughter Rita numbs out partying with her boyfriend Herman, son Tomi swears he's seeing his dead mother's ghost around the house. Then a new housekeeper, Darminah, shows up unannounced, supposedly sent by a family friend nobody can actually place. Right after, the bodies start dropping: a neighbor turns up hanged, and Herman is run down by a truck after nearly colliding with Darminah in the road. The shaman the family calls in for protection doesn't survive the living room — impaled by flying glass and crushed under a spinning chandelier. Tomi trails Darminah to the cemetery and watches her raise his own mother from the grave to hunt the family that's left her behind. Turns out the sweet new maid is a demon that feeds on households whose faith has gone slack, and it takes a kyai and a doorway full of Qur'an verses to burn the undead back to hell.