{"id":71622,"date":"2025-07-18T03:35:12","date_gmt":"2025-07-18T03:35:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/71622\/"},"modified":"2025-07-18T03:35:12","modified_gmt":"2025-07-18T03:35:12","slug":"the-queen-of-black-magic-is-a-colorful-portrait-of-a-cult-horror-legend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/71622\/","title":{"rendered":"The Queen of Black Magic’ Is a Colorful Portrait of a Cult Horror Legend"},"content":{"rendered":"

Suzzanna: The Queen of Black Magic offers an excellent introduction to the Indonesian movie<\/a> legend, but it\u2019s a fun watch even if you\u2019re already familiar with her work<\/a>. Just about the only prerequisite for enjoyment is being a horror fan<\/a>, because David Gregory\u2019s documentary is packed with clips from Suzzanna\u2019s gloriously over-the-top filmography, especially her much-loved early-\u201980s entries.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Queen of Indonesian Horror,\u201d as she came to be known, was born during World War II; she knew from an early age that she wanted to be a movie star. When she was just a teen, her first film role brought her critical acclaim. But she didn\u2019t truly ascend to her genre throne until the 1980s, when she starred in a series of gruesome shriekers playing characters\u2014inevitably, a woman who rises from the grave in search of vengeance\u2014based on well-known monsters from Indonesian folklore<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As you\u2019d expect, Suzzanna: The Queen of Black Magic explores the life and career of Suzanna Martha Frederika van Osch\u2014she was half-Dutch, which explains the last name. But it also digs into her impact on Indonesian cinema by touching on the country\u2019s complicated political and cultural history, particularly as it ran alongside her rise to fame. It\u2019s context that adds so much more to her story\u2014as does the film\u2019s inclusion of her personal struggles, especially the death of her son when he was just a teenager, to help us understand the emotions that guided her performances.<\/p>\n

And speaking of those performances, while Suzzanna\u2014as she was credited on-screen; she added a \u201cz\u201d to make her name sound more mysterious\u2014had beauty and talent, she also had an inherent spooky quality that, as contemporary Indonesian horror director Joko Anwar<\/a> says in the documentary, puts her on a level with Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, and Bela Lugosi. Her eyes\u2014haunting, mournful, electric\u2014were her trademark, and as a fan points out here, \u201cShe could play a role with just her gaze.\u201d<\/p>\n

Suzzanna cultivated an off-screen mystique that paralleled the roles she chose; she conducted magical rituals as she was getting into character, and many fans believed she herself had supernatural powers, an outlook she seems to have encouraged. She was unusually dedicated to her craft; at one point we hear from a makeup artist who recalls Suzzanna specifically wanting to use living snakes in a headdress she wore in Nyi Blorong to ensure maximum authenticity.<\/p>\n

Throughout the documentary, it\u2019s emphasized how Indonesian culture is strongly influenced by its legends and ghost stories. Among the producers, scholars, admirers, friends, and family members who show up as talking heads, there\u2019s also a Javanese mythology professor. This perspective helps viewers who aren\u2019t Indonesian understand the significance of Suzzanna portraying traditional folklore characters, most of whom have the same long, dark hair and high-pitched cackle-laughs and are motivated by themes revolving around pregnancy, childbirth, and revenge. Usually, it\u2019s revenge against a particularly deserving man, but Indonesia\u2019s cruel upper classes also felt the sting of her wrath, which further elevated her to hero status among her fans.<\/p>\n

Seemingly few interviews with Suzzanna exist; what we see of her beyond film clips is taken from press conferences, where she avoided discussing her personal life. But Suzzanna: The Queen of Black Magic does dig into a late-in-life scandal revolving around her second husband. We meet him early in the film as he shows us around the home they shared, including the room where Suzzanna died in 2008.<\/p>\n

If you notice he still looks rather young, that\u2019s because, as we later find out, they met when he was playing her teenage son in Sankuriang. They married despite their significant age difference\u2014and then co-starred in another film, again as mother and son!\u2014and the romance led to inheritance-adjacent tension with Suzzanna\u2019s daughter and son-in-law. That rift later erupted into violence and what appears to be an ongoing feud even after her death.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s messy drama\u2014with Suzzanna\u2019s reaction to it captured by an emotional showing for the press\u2014that still can\u2019t overshadow what\u2019s contained in Suzzanna\u2019s filmography. But it does make Suzzanna: The Queen of Black Magic a documentary that has more twists and turns than your typical restrospective.<\/p>\n

Along with the documentary now streaming on Shudder, the horror platform has added four of cult-favorite films that are prominently mentioned in it: Sundelbolong (1981), The Queen of Black Magic (1981), Nyi Blorong (1982), and Sankuriang (1982). It\u2019ll be difficult to resist immediately diving right into them after you glimpse all the clips teasing their lurid delights.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel<\/a>, Star Wars<\/a>, and Star Trek<\/a> releases, what\u2019s next for the DC Universe on film and TV<\/a>, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Suzzanna: The Queen of Black Magic offers an excellent introduction to the Indonesian movie legend, but it\u2019s a…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":71623,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,53,50094,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-71622","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-suzzanna-the-queen-of-black-magic","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114872144597720181","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71622\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}