Movies
Did You Know ‘Friday the 13th’ Got an Indonesian Ripoff?!
Friday the 13th, released on this day in 1980, spawned a handful of sequels and countless ripoffs. But did you know that in 1981, one year after its release, it got an Indonesian remake?!
In the wake of its box office success back in 1980, it seemed like every horror movie wanted to be Friday the 13th. Sure, films like Black Christmas and Halloween deserve a whole lot of credit for kick-starting the slasher movement, but it wasn’t until director Sean Cunningham and makeup effects master Tom Savini added a whole lot of gore to the mix that the slasher film finally became what it was perhaps always destined to be. Countless slashers that came along in the early ’80s tried their best to capture that magic, but none tried harder than Srigala.
Released in ’81, the Sisworo Gautama Putra-directed Indonesian film was a Friday the 13th ripoff in every sense of the term, lifting entire scenes and even specific shots from Sean Cunningham’s seminal classic. I watched a low quality version of the film without any subtitles many years back so it was kind of hard to pick up exactly what was going on, but here’s what I gathered.
Srigala is about a hidden treasure that lies at the bottom of the Indonesian equivalent of Crystal Lake, which a few treasure hunters are in hot pursuit of. At the same time, a group of young friends are vacationing on the lake, and the two groups soon find themselves face to face with an evil force that doesn’t exactly want them there. The threat, you ask? An older woman, of course!
It seems that those aforementioned treasure hunters unearthed a treasure chest with a dead body in it (the Indonesian equivalent of Jason Voorhees), and the woman who knocks off the horny young teens one by one, I can only assume, is the mother. Once the killing begins, almost everything on display in Srigala is lifted wholesale from Friday the 13th, right down to the kills: one girl goes off on her own and is struck in the head with an axe, while one of the dudes is pinned to a wall with a sharp weapon. There’s even a final battle that sees the final girl kill the woman.
And yes, in case you were wondering, the final girl heads out onto the lake after surviving the hellish ordeal. And yes, she has a nightmare wherein a monster pulls her into the water.
As far as I’m aware, Jason’s Indonesian doppelganger never returned for Srigala 2.
You can watch the Srigala trailer and final battle below!
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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