Impetigore is the kind of horror movie that makes you grateful your family tree is boring. No cursed villages, no demonic puppetry, no skinless babies—just good old-fashioned generational disappointment. Written and directed by Joko Anwar, this 2019 Indonesian folk horror gem manages to be genuinely terrifying, visually gorgeous, and darkly funny in that “I’m laughing because therapy is expensive” sort of way.
On the surface, it’s a simple setup: Maya (Tara Basro), a broke tollbooth worker in Jakarta, discovers she might have inherited a mansion in a remote village and decides to go claim it with her best friend Dini (Marissa Anita). Because if horror cinema has taught us anything, it’s that surprise rural property is never, ever a trap. What follows is a descent into a village-sized nightmare of curses, puppets, family secrets, and more funerals than a Godfather marathon.
Welcome to Harjosari, Population: Don’t Reproduce
The village of Harjosari is one of the most unsettling locations in recent horror, and not just because everyone looks like they’d rather you left. Anwar leans hard into Indonesian rural atmosphere: misty forests, creaking houses, dim candlelight, and faces that carry a lifetime of bad omens. This place doesn’t just feel cursed—it feels tired of being cursed.
Daily child funerals, a cemetery crammed with tiny headstones, villagers side-eyeing outsiders like they brought the plague in their luggage… the mood is oppressive in the best way. You can practically smell the damp wood and generational trauma. And when we finally realize all the babies are being born without skin, it’s less a twist and more of an, “Ah. Yes. That tracks.”
Maya and Dini: Besties on the Worst Road Trip
Tara Basro’s Maya is the perfect horror protagonist: practical, vulnerable, and just stubborn enough to keep pushing when any reasonable person would run screaming back to the tollbooth. She’s not a scream queen—she’s a “Oh hell no, we’re not doing this” queen.
Marissa Anita’s Dini, meanwhile, is the kind of friend we all want: ride-or-die, snark locked and loaded, willing to fake being a university researcher for a shot at a better life. Their chemistry gives the film its early warmth and humor. Their banter feels real—two women coping with poverty and uncertainty by laughing at the absurdity of it all. Which, of course, makes it hurt more when the village decides one of them is flayable property.
Dini’s fate is brutal, but the film doesn’t linger on her suffering for cheap thrills. Instead, it weaponizes the loss: after Dini is mistaken for Rahayu and slaughtered, the story shifts into something more tragic and furious. The dark humor that follows is edged with grief—less “haha” and more “oh, we’re really doing this, huh?”
The Curse, or: Why You Don’t Outsource Your Medical Care to Satan
The curse at the heart of Impetigore is a masterclass in folk horror logic:
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Rahayu (Maya) is born skinless because Saptadi’s witchy mother Misni cursed her for being the product of an affair.
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Donowongso, desperate father of the year, decides the solution is to make a deal with dark forces and sacrifice three village girls, turning their skin into wayang kulit puppets to fix his daughter.
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It works for Rahayu… and absolutely ruins everyone else’s womb for the next two decades.
This is horror built on bad decisions layered over worse decisions, until the whole village becomes one giant cautionary tale about pride, guilt, and never letting your mom also be the local dukun. Misni (played with icy menace by Christine Hakim) is one of horror’s great terrifying elders—she doesn’t rant or cackle; she simply decides how cursed you’re going to be and then lets time do the work.
There’s a grim, darkly funny logic to it: one man’s shortcut to fix his kid becomes everyone else’s lifelong problem. It’s like a village-wide group project where nobody volunteered but everyone still has to suffer the grade.
Wayang Kulit and the Art of Elegant Dread
What sets Impetigore apart from a lot of modern horror is how deeply it roots its scares in culture. The wayang kulit puppets aren’t just props—they’re woven into the narrative, theme, and imagery. Shadows on cloth, stylized figures, and ritual performances echo the film’s own structure: a story about stories, where the past is literally projected onto the present.
The puppets made from the victims’ skin are one of the most elegantly horrific ideas in recent genre film. It’s gruesome, yes, but it’s also poetic in a nauseating way: the murdered girls’ bodies are transformed into tools of entertainment and art, their suffering repackaged as storytelling. It’s a bitter little metaphor for how communities gloss over atrocities with myth and tradition. Nothing says “we’re fine, really” like staging a show with your sins stretched, dried, and backlit.
Sound, Silence, and Screams You Don’t See
The film’s sound design is another major highlight. Creaking floors, distant chanting, the wet sounds you wish you didn’t hear in the dark—everything is tuned to make your nerves hum. Anwar knows when to go loud and when to go suffocatingly quiet.
There’s also a restraint here that’s refreshing. Yes, there’s blood. Yes, there are some deeply disturbing images. But Impetigore isn’t a gore parade. Its horror often lives in suggestion: the way villagers look at Maya, the echoes of off-screen violence, the sense that this land itself is holding its breath. It trusts your imagination to do some of the worst work—and, as always, your brain is a much better special effects department than any CGI studio.
Misni, Saptadi, and the Joys of Terrible Parenting
At its core, this is a movie about catastrophically bad parenting. Donowongso loves his daughter so much he dooms an entire village. Misni loves her son Saptadi so much she curses away his memories and weaponizes his life. Saptadi, the village head and puppet master, spends decades living inside a lie, stringing along his community in more ways than one.
Saptadi’s eventual act—killing himself rather than watching Misni flay Maya—is simultaneously tragic and darkly ironic. After all those years of playing god with his villagers’ beliefs, his big moment of agency is finally refusing to participate. Misni’s response, slitting her own throat to “join” her son, is the horrifying cherry on top of this cursed family sundae. These are the kind of people who would rather die dramatically than admit, “We might have handled this badly.”
Hope, With a Side of Doom
Maya and Ratih’s attempt to break the curse—burying the puppets, pacifying the girls’ spirits—actually works, at least temporarily. A healthy baby is born. The villagers allow Maya to leave. For one shining moment, it looks like the cycle is broken.
And then, a year later, Misni’s ghost shows up, snacks on a fetus, and reminds you that evil doesn’t respect neat endings. It’s a wonderfully nasty final sting: the curse is gone, but some hungers outlive the rules that created them. It’s like the universe saying, “Congrats on passing the exam. Unfortunately, the building is still haunted.”
A Modern Horror Classic From the Damned Land
Impetigore earns its reputation as one of the standout horror films of the last decade. It combines folkloric dread, family tragedy, and social commentary into something that feels both culturally specific and universally nightmarish. Tara Basro is compelling and grounded, Christine Hakim is chilling, and the ensemble of villagers feels drawn from actual lives rather than central casting.
Most impressively, the movie manages to be bleak as hell without feeling empty. Its darkness has purpose. Its violence has consequences. Its humor—dry, sharp, and often buried under layers of fear—comes from the absurdity of humans trying to negotiate with forces that do not care about their pride, secrets, or property lines.
If you like your horror rich, atmospheric, and laced with the kind of dark humor that makes you question your own soul for chuckling, Impetigore is a trip worth taking. Just don’t go checking your family photos afterward. You never know which old house in the background is waiting for you to come home.
