Getting bitten by a vampire is usually where your problems begin, but in Siti Si Vampir, apparently that’s also the point where your social status gets a promotion, and this upcoming Indonesian horror-comedy takes the basic idea of a woman suddenly becoming a vampire and gives it a very Indonesian twist.
Siti, a young woman who lives in a public housing complex, wakes up to discover that she has become a vampire – but there’s another rather bizarre development waiting for her, as she also finds herself in a luxurious home and suddenly surrounded by the sort of elite lifestyle that is about as far removed from her old life as you can get.
This isn’t an entirely new vampire story either, because Siti Si Vampir is being adapted from Siti Vampire, the Singaporean Viddsee Original that originally appeared as a five-episode short-form series in 2021, where the original series was created and directed by M. Raihan Halim, with Farah Lola playing Siti Farhana.
The 2021 Siti Vampire was built around Siti’s vampire curse, friendship, self-acceptance and the practical nightmare of needing blood, and this new film has moved the concept into contemporary Jakarta and expanded the premise into family drama and class satire.
Teaser Trailer
Rahabi Mandra Has a Very Different Kind of Horror Problem Here
Director Rahabi Mandra is best known for films including Kadet 1947 and Gampang Cuan, as well as writing work on projects such as Night Bus, while he also received a Citra Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Night Bus at the 2017 Indonesian Film Festival.
And Mandra has already described the vampire concept in explicitly social terms, as for him, the vampire represents the upper class – Siti is essentially an ordinary woman who suddenly gets “bitten” by the chance to become part of an elite world, while the screenplay comes from Titien Wattimena, whose credits include Dilan 1990, Dilan 1991, Aruna & Her Palate, June & Kopi, Noktah Merah Perkawinan and the horror film Guna Guna Istri Muda, which is quite a broad collection of material.
Satine Zaneta Gets to Stop Being the Tough One
Satine Zaneta plays Siti, and this is a particularly different role for her – she is the daughter of actor Abimana Aryasatya, but has also established herself as a singer in her own right, but Siti Si Vampir is her debut in comedy, and she has described the role as being outside her comfort zone.
Satine has also said that the casting process came relatively late, with Siti being one of the final major roles the production found, where she agreed to audition after reading the synopsis and was attracted by the chance to do something very different from her previous work.
Her previous screen work includes the 2025 horror movie Penjagal Iblis: Dosa Turunan, so she isn’t completely unfamiliar with genre material, and Satine has also singled out Ajil Ditto, who plays Dudi, as a major source of laughter during filming, as she said some jokes were improvised rather than being entirely contained in the script.
The cast also brings includes Ajil Ditto, Ciccio Manassero and Shania Gracia, with the casting also pushes the movie toward a younger Indonesian audience, which makes sense considering the source material originally found its audience through a short-form digital platform rather than conventional cinema.
Viddsee Is Finally Taking One of Its Small-Screen Ideas to the Cinema
There’s actually a bigger story behind Siti Si Vampir than the vampire itself – the feature is Vidsee’s first feature film, and the company announced the project at MIPCOM Cannes in October 2025, and it is being made as a co-production with Indonesian production company Mahaka Pictures, with the film designed to move from Viddsee’s short-form ecosystem into theatrical distribution, streaming and international markets.
The production companies involved in the finished film include Bahagia Tanpa Drama, Viddsee, AZ Films, Spectrum Film and PK Films, while Celerina Judisari is producing, while Viddsee’s Kenny Png and Ho Jia Jian are also involved on the production side – that’s significant because Viddsee’s whole model has historically been about discovering filmmakers and stories through short-form content, so Siti Vampire is effectively becoming the experiment:
Can a story that worked in five tiny episodes survive the jump to a cinema screen?
Jakarta, Vampires and Class Anxiety
The most useful thing I think about the new version is that it doesn’t seem particularly interested in importing a Western vampire mythology wholesale, as the filmmakers are using the vampire as a ridiculous but fairly obvious metaphor for class mobility in modern Jakarta.
Siti starts from a public-housing background and suddenly finds herself inside an elite environment, where Mandra has explicitly described the character as someone who is effectively “bitten” into the upper class, with the film using that transformation to poke fun at the distance between social groups.
And it also explains why the filmmakers have chosen to call this a drama horror-comedy rather than selling it as a straightforward horror movie, because the horror element is basically the absurd mechanism through which the social satire gets to happen.
Siti Si Vampir is scheduled to open across Indonesian cinemas on October 22, 2026.
Check out some more Indonesian horror movies.
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