Ghost With Hole (1981)

Original title: Sundelbolong/Sundel Bolong

Indonesia in the early 80s. Former prostitute Alisa (Suzzanna) has found love with ship’s captain Hendarto (Barry Prima) – apparently his only name. But just after they have gotten married, Alisa’s luck changes for the worst. On the day of their marriage, Hendarto is commanded to go on a voyage that’ll keep him away from home for nine months without any possibility of seeing or hearing from Alisa in that time apart from the occasional letter. I’d suspect Hendarto is Indonesian for Kirk, but we get to see his perfectly normal looking ship, so I have no idea what’s going on there.

Alisa is a bit bored and sad alone at home, but her job search meant to alleviate that only leads to an even nastier development. Her former madam Mami (Ruth Pelupessi) teams up with a sleazy fashion shop owner (Rudy Salam) to get Alisa back into the prostitution biz. When that doesn’t work, Rudy and some henchmen rape Alisa. Even though this is an even more difficult thing in Indonesia at this time and place than it would be today, Alisa goes through the horrors of a rape trial. Before that can end as badly for her as you would suspect, she realizes she is pregnant; attempts to get an abortion end with a judgmental preachy physician (who also informs us that miscarriages are the main cause of disability in children) and visions of disfigured children floating in the air around Alisa.

On her very last rope, Alisa tries to abort the foetus herself, and dies in the process. Because this woman clearly can’t catch even the tiniest break, and she died very angry and bitter indeed, she very quickly returns as a ghost, a so-called sundel bolong, a woman with no feet (unless she wishes to be seen otherwise) and a rotting hole in her back. In a somewhat more socially acceptable looking form, she spends half of her nights romancing the now finally returned Hendarto while, in an early Daredevil move Stan Lee would be proud of, pretending to be her own, actually dead, twin sister Shinta.

Looking rather more frightening, the other half of the night is time for taking vengeance on the rapists and human monsters responsible for her sad fate. Well, and for some comic relief when she terrorizes some night workers for reasons.

The villains are not going to take this lying down, so there are attacks on Hendarto that provide Prima with the opportunity to show off some of his screen fighting skills, and even an evil exorcist shooting a laser finger.

Ghost with Hole is one of the many cooperations between Indonesian horror maestro Sisworo Gautama Putra and the country’s great horror star Suzzanna. The film does a fine job when it comes to shifting the folk tales it uses as a basis into contemporary Indonesia. As in most of the director’s films I have seen, Indonesia becomes a kind of liminal place, where the very modern and the very traditional, as well as very Western and very – to my very Western eyes – traditionally Muslim ways of looking at the world and being in her collide. This liminality is not po-faced and intellectualised, thank the gods, but rather a side effect of what at its core is very traditional exploitation filmmaking of the kind where certain universal tropes – the rape revenge, the opportunity to show off as much female nudity as the censor allows, the love for crude and imaginative violence and so on – are seen through a more individual and local lens. This is a movie made mostly for the local Indonesian market but of course influenced by everything from the rest of the world that made its way there, leading to that joyful mix of the very universal and the very specific I love so dearly in a movie. As it should be.

The film’s early stages are somewhat heavy going. The melodrama is absolutely necessary for the ghost story to work, but tastes of the time and place do lead for this part of the film to drag on a little long, with ever more troubles and horrors ladled onto Alisa’s plate until it becomes a bit exhausting to watch; it’s also not exactly pleasant, but then, it’s not supposed to be.

I find it rather interesting how easy it is to read the whole movie, like many melodramas, as a feminist film. Sure, there’s the obligatory scene of Alisa getting prayed away at the end, but you couldn’t have sold this to the censors any other way. Otherwise, the film is completely on Alisa’s side – even the ranting doctor and the deformed baby visions don’t feel like an attempt at attacking Alisa by the movie, but rather like another moment when the melodrama hones in on the enormous pressure society puts on this woman, until she desperately breaks.

This does of course also cause the film’s horror half to be rather a lot of fun. Alisa dispatching the nasty bastards responsible for her death in increasingly surrealistic and imaginative ways (personal favourite: the flying four arms technique, though I’m also a fan of the googly-eyed half-rotten corpse look she sometimes shifts into) like a prettier and a lot less morally icky Freddy Krueger is a sight to behold, as are the scenes of her romancing Hendarto again; the latter as something of a bittersweet counter-argument against the basic meanness of the world its melodrama struggled against.

That Suzzanna is great in whatever form the film needs her to be in is a given, once you’ve seen her in a few movies, but let me again emphasise how wonderful she shifts between the serious and dignified sufferer, the angry ghost and the light-hearted lover, and how important she is for holding Ghost with Hole’s disparate elements together.