If you enjoyed Scream and Cabin in the Woods, you’ll want to give this Indonesian horror a spin: it’s a gleefully referential slasher set not in a cabin in the woods, but a villa in the jungle. Said villa has no phone signal, but does benefit from regular power cuts, an old Dutch cemetery located barely 300m away, a live-in creepy uncle, regular visions of a little girl dressed in white, an obviously cursed well, and a forbidden room which may or may not be included in the floor plan. The characters immediately clock that the situation resembles a horror movie, and frankly, you’d lose all respect for them if they didn’t.
But the more the cliches pile up, the more we (and at least one of the characters) realise some sort of complicated meta-horror game is afoot. Why would a dumb jock, shy nerd, irritating guy, tomboy and girly girl with no real backstory be hanging out here anyway? The film gets into some slightly sticky territory when the characters have discussions of the “make it make sense” variety, but is on firmer footing with anything that involves commenting on and playing around with the various tropes of horror movies, with a particular focus on Indonesian horror cliches – and it gets wilder and sillier as it progresses.
Director Yusron Fuadi obviously owes a debt here to the aforementioned Cabin in the Woods, the enjoyable 2011 horror comedy directed by Drew Goddard and scripted by Goddard and Joss Whedon – but then Cabin in the Woods owed a debt to Scream, which owed a debt to Halloween, which owed a debt to Psycho, and so on and so forth, through a constellation of countless horrors, self-reflexive and otherwise. Is there a sense of diminishing returns eventually, as the genre is endlessly remixed and sampled? Will horror eat itself? Not yet, says The Draft! – or at the very least, it will make the act of autophagia a highly entertaining one.
• The Draft! is on digital platforms from 27 October.
