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‘Srigala’ – The 1981 Indonesian ‘Friday the 13th’ Ripoff You’ve Probably Never Seen

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srigala

The 1981 Indonesian movie Srigala is by no means known by the masses, but those in the loop about vintage and obscure Southeast Asian horror are aware of its existence for one reason. The director of the original Satan’s Slaves, once a steady provider of Indonesia’s homegrown horrors, joined the legion of eager filmmakers who set out to make their own slasher after watching the first Friday the 13th. However, Sisworo Gautama Putra did more than just borrow a concept — he lifted an entire ending.

Before Srigala (or “Wolf” in English) gets on with some of the most blatant copycatting in horror, Putra delivers a different movie for the first fifty minutes. The opening kill shows an unsuspecting scuba diver being gutted by an unseen assailant once he comes up to examine the small trinket he plucked from a large lake. Later, three fortune hunters arrive at the same doomed location, searching for treasure on the lake bottom.

Caroko (S. Parya) and his two assistants, Tom and Johan (Barry Prima, Rudy Salam), receive unexpected company at Situ Angsana; Nina, Hesty and Pono (Lydia Kandou, Siska Widowati, Dorman Borisman) have all come to camp in the nearby forest. Not wanting these strangers to interfere with their mission, Caroko tries to scare the three away with tales of demons and ghosts. The women, however, opt to stay after catching an eyeful of Tom and Johan.

srigala

Srigala doesn’t have much in the way of horror during these first two acts. The two groups have a stalker on their hands, yes, but no real harm comes to the main characters until later. The only tangible threat shown early on is the antagonist menacing the treasure hunters with a speedboat. A lengthy and rather intense chase on the lake results in an instant explosion once the villain’s vessel touches dry land. Weirdly, though, the characters go on as if the boat incident never even happened.

The following scene feels like the director needed to pad the runtime. At the others’ campsite, the women exchange blows after Nina suggests to Hesty that she shouldn’t be so trustful of Johan. Maybe Putra thought his movie was getting too serious at this point. Otherwise, why would he insert this random catfight? Nina and Hesty turn out to be well-versed in the martial arts, seeing as they kick, punch and strike one another with moves straight out of a classic Hong Kong actioner. Pono continues to be the movie’s comic relief when he uses his crotch to stop the violence. This whole moment is as ridiculous as it is unnecessary, but it also provides the biggest guffaw in Srigala.

Friday the 13th isn’t the only horror movie from the Western hemisphere to inspire Srigala; another of Nina’s scenes owes itself to ‘70s Italian horror. As Nina struggles to fall asleep during a thunderstorm, several zombies rise from the nearby lake. This is, of course, after the hunters previously mistook a coffin, one packed with a rotting corpse, for sunken treasure. Well, these lurching zombies head straight for Nina’s campsite, where they proceed to menace her in the rain-drenched forest. This all turns out to be a nightmare, blurring the movie’s line between reality and fantasy even further. As for the movie’s Italian inspirations, the undead may just be men whose faces were smeared in green goo, but they were likely fashioned (albeit poorly) after Lucio Fulci’s brand of zombies. Meanwhile, the tent scenes bathed in red lighting and the sinister weather had to have been influenced by Dario Argento’s Suspiria.

srigala

The time eventually comes for the movie to live up to its legacy. The disguised driver from the speedboat chase begins to bump off the core characters before there’s only one person left standing. And since Putra all but copied the denouement from Victor Miller’s script, the fact that the killer is a woman shouldn’t be surprising. Yet how she figures into the story is the one glaring difference between her and Pamela Voorhees. While Mrs. Voorhees was avenging her drowned son in Friday the 13th, the murderer here was acting out of greed and pure self-interest.

It’s fascinating how far Putra went to replicate the iconic conclusion of Friday the 13th. Apart from a few significant changes — most of all, there’s no cathartic beheading to speak of — the filmmaker simulated Mrs. Voorhees’ massacre as much as possible. Does he pull it off? Almost. As for the legendary boat scene, Srigala can’t withstand the urge to do its own jump-scare. Dream sequence or not, though, it makes little narrative sense for a zombie to suddenly pop out of the lake at the end. But for the sake of a cheap thrill? Sure, why not.

If not for its flagrant scene theft, Srigala would have, in all likelihood, been forgotten or left undiscovered outside of its homeland. Anyone expecting a Friday the 13th remake will be disappointed, seeing as the “creative” poaching is tucked away in the movie’s back end. It’s the original parts before then that drag the whole picture down. Nevertheless, the appeal of something as strange as Srigala is hard to resist.


Horrors Elsewhere is a recurring column that spotlights a variety of movies from all around the globe, particularly those not from the United States. Fears may not be universal, but one thing is for sure — a scream is understood, always and everywhere.

Paul Lê is a Texas-based, Tomato approved critic at Bloody Disgusting, Dread Central, and Tales from the Paulside.

Editorials

‘The Company of Wolves’ at 40: One of the Most Underrated Werewolf Movies Ever Made

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There’s a compelling idea in anthropology that many ancient werewolf legends are derived from our species’ need to rationalize the more animalistic side of humanity – which is why lycanthropy has historically been used to explain everything from medieval serial killers to cannibalism. While I personally think there’s a lot more to unpack when it comes to tales of wolfmen and women, this is still a great example of why so many of our most enduring fairy tales involve big bad wolves.

And in the world of film, I think there’s only one feature that really nails the folkloric origins of werewolf stories, namely Neil Jordan’s 1984 fairy-tale horror classic, The Company of Wolves. Even four decades later, there’s no other genre flick that comes close to capturing the dreamlike ambience behind this strange anthology, and that’s why I’d like to take this opportunity to look back on one of the most underrated werewolf flicks ever made.

The Company of Wolves was originally a short story contained in the 1979 anthology The Bloody Chamber, a collection of deconstructed fairy-tales intended for mature readers penned by English author Angela Carter. With the book quickly becoming a hit as readers became fascinated with its subversion of classic folk stories and (then) controversial feminist undertones, it was soon transformed into a duology of BBC radio-dramas which adapted both The Company of Wolves and Carter’s reimagining of Puss-in-Boots.

These radio-dramas soon attracted the attention of then up-and-coming Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan, who decided to meet with Carter to discuss expanding on her stories and bringing them to life on the big screen. The duo soon realized that a single short story wasn’t enough material for a feature-length film, so they decided to adapt all of Carter’s werewolf tales into a single anthology.

With a completed script and a $2.3 million budget, Jordan decided to tackle the project like a hybrid between a theatrical period drama and a schlocky monster movie. Effects-heavy creature features were a hot commodity back in the ’80s, with films like The Howling and An American Werewolf in London proving that there was an audience for horrific lycanthrope transformations, so the director soon recruited a team that could turn this odd collection of feminist folk stories into something commercially viable.

Not exactly a great pick for family movie night.

Shooting would eventually take place almost entirely within the England-based Shepperton Studios, with notable production designer Anton Furst (who would later be known for his work on Tim Burton’s Batman films) helping to bring Jordan’s vision of a darkly romantic fairy-tale world to life. Appropriately enough, production would also involve a real pack of trained wolves (as well as a collection of dyed dogs), though extensive puppetry and animatronics were also used to flesh out the more gruesome parts of the flick.

After a grueling nine-week shoot where budgetary constraints led to corners being cut on props and costumes, The Company of Wolves was finally released in September of 1984 – just in time for spooky season. In the finished film, we follow the strange dreams of a sulky teenage girl named Rosaleen (first-time actress Sarah Patterson) as the film unravels an Arabian-Nights-inspired tapestry of both familiar and not-so-familiar stories about big bad wolves.

From sexually charged cautionary tales to parables about female empowerment, this surreal collection of deranged bedtime stories is much more than the creature feature that the marketing initially suggested. Like a more horror-oriented version of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, The Company of Wolves exudes that same kind of hormonal teenage energy that transports us back to a time when the world was both scary and exciting in equal measure.

That’s not to say that this is an entirely pleasant experience, however, and I’m not just talking about the film’s horror elements. A big portion of the flick’s overtly sexual moments involve the then 13-year-old Patterson coming to grips with her blossoming womanhood and the dangers of predatory men (usually marked with a humorous unibrow), something that naturally makes for some intentionally uncomfortable viewing – especially in the year of our lord 2024.

Obviously, I don’t think it’s my place to dissect (or even judge) the effectiveness of the film’s commentaries on being a young woman, but even as a man I can still appreciate the thought and care that went into crafting this Jungian cocktail of serious themes in a genre-movie package that almost certainly went on to inspire future werewolf movies like Ginger Snaps.

Not the worst wedding I’ve been to.

That being said, what really keeps me coming back to the film is the absurd amount of memorable imagery. From a wedding party being taken over by canines to lonely treks through snowy groves, this is exactly the gloomy world I imagined as a child when reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales – and the dreamy atmosphere is only enhanced by the movie’s overall theatricality.

This also extends to the effects, as it’s easy to forgive decapitated dummy heads and ripped rubber skin when everything is happening in a magical hyper-reality, with a great example of this is being the scene where Grandma’s head unexpectedly explodes like a porcelain doll when it’s knocked off by a wolfman. That’s not to say that the effects are bad, as several of these transformations are downright grisly and likely influenced future lycanthrope effects like those in Underworld and even Trick ‘r Treat (even if the wolf-dogs here often look more cute than scary).

Of course, these aren’t the only things that The Company of Wolves has going for it, as the main trio of Patterson, Micha Bergese and the late, great Angela Lansbury exceptionally bring these exaggerated caricatures to life and the orchestral score is an absolute delight. I also really get a kick out of that bizarre ending implying that the dangers of adult life have literally come crashing into Rosaleen’s bedroom.

The Company of Wolves may not be a perfect film, suffering from some wonky pacing and the classic anthology problem where some stories are clearly much more enjoyable than others, but I’d argue that the flick’s iconic visuals and powerful thematic throughline more than make up for any minor flaws. And while we’ve seen bigger and better werewolf films since then, when it comes to adult-oriented fairy-tales, this is one psycho-sexual journey that is still worth revisiting 40 years down the line.

The Company of Wolves

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