The Trump Presidency is symptomatic of a wider global infection of divisive, authoritarian rhetoric. It hardly matters how you align politically; the world is in upheaval. It feels unsettled out there, and scary. Film, as it has always done, succeeds when it reacts to disturbances in the social ecosystem. The horror genre, for its relative affordability and lack of substantive oversight, is the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Small wonder, then, that we find ourselves in the middle of a golden age for horror films.

Historically, there have been little pockets of exceptional horror that cropped up in places where things were particularly bad, and today is no exception. What’s interesting about this new glut of product is that it doesn’t seem to be honoring international borders. Streaming platforms have something to do with the globalization of product, of course, but what’s really promising is that they also seem to be encouraging the development of industries that aren’t traditionally known for their output. Maybe it’s just that we never had the opportunity to see as many things, from as many divergent voices, as we have now. It’s a golden age for access, too.

Case in point is Shudder’s “originals” releases leading up to Halloween, showcasing not only a film from France (Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge) and Argentina (Demian Rugna’s tremendous flick Terrified), but Joko Anwar’s unusually effective Indonesian horror Satan’s Slaves. A remake of a Sisworo Gautama Putra film of the same name from 1980 (the film that director Anwar credits for making him want to be a filmmaker), Satan’s Slaves represents another step in the recovery of Indonesia’s struggling film industry that reached its peak in the 1980s, when it produced around a hundred films a year; of late, it’s produced less than ten a year. Reasons for its decline are numerous —the proliferation of foreign films squeezing off local production chief among them— but it’s also instructive to note Indonesia’s own reckoning with authoritarian leadership in the regime of General Muhammed Soerharto. Until 1998, Soerharto presided over a culture of extreme nepotism, brutal silencing of dissent, and brazen financial corruption. Conditions have been ripe over these last twenty years for independent film in Indonesia. The first fruits of the reconciliation are Gareth Evans’ two internationally embraced The Raid pictures and now Anwar’s festival darling, Satan’s Slaves.

There are a few ways to unwrap Anwar’s film. On its face, Satan’s Slave is an immensely satisfying horror film, made with craft and a real affection for the genre. There are ghosts, zombies, possessions, what appears to be a coven of some kind and Satanic cultists. Its cast is anchored by a phenomenal Tara Basro as Rini, the oldest sister and de facto matriarch of a family reeling under the loss of their mother in the opening few minutes of the film, and then her father when he goes off to try to rekindle his flagging business interests. Rini is left to take care of her wheelchair-bound grandmother and three little brothers as it slowly comes clear that their dead mother had made a deal with the literal devil. In a prologue, Anwar introduces the mother (Ayu Laksmi) as a successful lounge singer suggesting that this might be a version of the Robert Johnson myth where a musician sells her soul for fame. In a neat subversion, Anwar reveals that, instead, she’s traded the soul of her youngest child for the ability to have had children in the first place. Fears around female fertility are the foundation of most fundamentalist belief systems. In setting itself up this way, Satan’s Slaves becomes a smart, distaff version of the Frankenstein mythology.

Satan’s Slaves can also be unpacked as a political document of the Soerharto era. Its title alone suggests the amount of complicity necessary for the rise of a corrupt oligarchy. The film often feels, in intensity and allegorical significance, like the first round of movies produced by China’s Fifth Generation filmmakers – particularly Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum. Like that film, Satan’s Slaves presents an old person as a stand-in for aging leadership and failed dogma. The mother is voiceless as the film opens, given a bell to ring when she needs something, and constantly looking into empty corners and pointing at horrors that, for a while, only she can see. She’s made a mess of things and it will be up to her children to clean it up.

It’s also a film about the kind of legacy that we leave and have been left for us. Its subplot that takes the father away from the home is all about not being able to make a living when the middle class is destroyed to feed the appetites of the 1%. Religion in the form of a smug, impotent Islamic Ustadz (Arswendi Bening Swara), is seen as pathetic and in its support of the fundamentalism of authoritarian regimes, complicit in the suffering of the most vulnerable.is technically proficient, beautifully shot and edited and scored with heat, but it’s also a thoroughly modern film about the heroism of a young woman standing firm in the face of the unspeakable horrors left to her by the people who were supposed to have protected her. For it to find a wide audience speaks to its quality, sure, but also to the urgency with which we all need to pay attention to things like canaries in coal mines.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due Spring of 2019. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Watch Satan's Slaves on Shudder