A sacred ritual, an eclipse, jealous dancers and a demon that decides to possess people – The Curse of Kampong Batu is not exactly taking the minimalist approach here, the film is a Cambodia-Indonesia horror co-production set in Cambodia and built around a supernatural story involving the village of Kampong Batu, about Riya, a young dancer chosen to lead a sacred ritual during a total lunar eclipse.
When jealousy leads fellow dancer Noni and her sister Sara to sabotage the ritual’s frangipani flowers, the ceremony goes catastrophically wrong and a demonic presence enters the village, where around 95% of the movie was filmed in Cambodia, with the remaining production taking place in Jakarta. – The Cambodian cinema listings currently give it a 91-minute runtime, and it is playing in Khmer-language screenings across Cambodian cinemas.
The Trailer
This Was Designed as a Two-Country Production
The film comes from Nisero Production in Indonesia and Mediaload in Cambodia, with Ivan Nisero Makawengkel directing and writing the screenplay., and producers Deni Dirmansyah and Rissa Putri were behind the project.
Deni Dirmansyah explained during the film’s 2024 production announcement that the project was developed around the lives of Indonesian families living in Cambodia, particularly families whose parents had connections to the Indonesian military forces that assisted Cambodia’s independence – their children grow up in Cambodia and become immersed in Cambodian customs, including Apsara dance, which is treated as a sacred traditional art form in the film.
The Cast Had to Learn Three Languages
The main Indonesian cast includes Fauzi Baadila, Shaquila Keisha, Adzana Ashel and Miea Kusuma, alongside Cambodian actress and model Chouri Lourhours, but the production also had an unusual requirement: the principal performers needed to work in Indonesian, English and Khmer.
Director Ivan Nisero Makawengkel specifically discussed the difficulty of bringing Indonesian and Cambodian performers and crew together, pointing to differences in language, working practices and cultural habits, and the actors also had to train in traditional Cambodian dance for their roles.
Eight Months of Research Went Into the Story
Deni Dirmansyah has said the filmmakers spent roughly eight months researching the story before production, where their stated aim was to create a horror film drawing from both Indonesian and Cambodian cultures, rather than simply reproducing the conventions of Indonesian horror in another location.
The story also uses Apsara dance, a lunar-eclipse ritual and the relationship between the human and spirit worlds as parts of its horror machinery, so the filmmakers were therefore trying to make the cultural material part of the actual narrative rather than decoration.
Whether all that research translates into a genuinely convincing horror film is another question, and it’s also notable because the project was announced as potentially the first film collaboration between Indonesian and Cambodian filmmakers.
Check out some more Cambodian horror movies.
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