When’s the best time to watch a prequel? You’d think it’d be natural to get them in first, and plenty of people do just that. I have several friends who’ve introduced their kids to Star Wars in chronological order, from the crushing disappointment of The Phantom Menace, to the crushing disappointment of The Rise of Skywalker. How many lifelong Jedi will emerge from this process remains to be seen, but thinking about Star Wars does flag up a problem with this “prequels-first” approach. A prequel is where a story begins, yes, but it’s not where a franchise begins, and most are made to be watched by people who are already invested in a property and want to know where certain elements of it originate. Without that historical emotional investment, their dramatic priorities can be puzzling to newcomers.
It’s bold, then, for Shudder to release Dancing Village: The Curse Begins without the support of KKN, Curse of the Dancing Village – the massive domestic hit from 2022 that it’s following up, but there are reasons why this is a better idea than it seems. Commercially speaking, KKN‘s director Awi Suryadi is less well-known in the West than Kimo Stamboel – the person at the helm of The Curse Begins. Stamboel has collaborated a number of times with Timo Tjahjanto, whose work on the V/H/S movies, as well as Netflix films like The Night Comes for Us, has made him an international standard-bearer for Indonesian genre cinema. Indonesian films still don’t have the global profile of Japanese, Korean or any of those from the Chinese territories, but they’re getting there, and Dancing Village: The Curse Begins should get them another step or two closer to the acclaim they deserve.
Indeed, Westerners who were inducted into Asian cinema by something like Ringu or Kwaidan might get a pleasingly familiar sense of unease here – that prickly, productive uncertainty as to whether something is a brilliant new innovation, or a traditional cultural element that we’re simply not familiar with. For Westerners of my generation, Hideo Nakata might as well have invented the dark-haired ghost child, and the fact that he didn’t, doesn’t make Ringu any less impressive. Likewise, it doesn’t matter whether Dancing Village: The Curse Begins‘ ornate mythology is original to the social-media-based source, author Simpleman, or not. When the heroine Mila lodges with a woman whose mother is seriously ill, the mother’s symptoms appear to be pure horror-movie business – boils, red eyes, a trail of black drool coming from her mouth. When Mila sympathetically notes that her mother has the same condition you wonder, “Is this just an ordinary tropical disease that our side of the globe has been lucky enough to be spared?”.
Indeed, Westerners who were inducted into Asian cinema by something like Ringu or Kwaidan might get a pleasingly familiar sense of unease here.
Probably not actually, and it’s no spoiler to say that the disease’s symptoms become even more dramatic, which allows Stamboel to introduce a well-realised element of gore into what could have been a vaporously supernatural curse narrative – but for a while you just don’t know, and this kind of uncertainty actually supports the movie’s themes. Not all manifestations of the supernatural in Dancing Village: The Curse Begins are frightening ones, and Mila’s journey begins when she consults a shaman who tells her to return a bangle she owns to the village it originates from – and for a while that’s the register this film works in. Dancing Village: The Curse Begins depicts 1980s Indonesia as a modernising nation with an Abrahamic religion, where older shamanic models of belief casually persist alongside this newer faith. In Indonesia’s case that newer faith is Islam rather than Christianity, but other than it’s also a perfect description of British folk horror.
So for all its intriguing foreign qualities, there’s a way in to Dancing Village: The Curse Begins, and it’s not the only element that European viewers might find surprisingly familiar. The film begins with a flashback to 1955 (suggesting there’s room for a prequel to this prequel), as a room full of people dance themselves into a state of collapse. The last dancer standing is chosen to serve Aulia Sarah’s beguilingly elegant villain Badarawuhi, but that image of people literally dancing ’til they drop recalls the tarantism (or dancing mania), that spread throughout continental Europe during the Middle Ages. Now regarded as a case of mass hysteria, the tarantism has been the subject of Jonathan Glazer’s experimental short Strasbourg 1518 but (as far as I can tell), no actual horror films – which isn’t surprising. The reality of people dancing until they die is horrible to consider, but surely on film it would just look like a musical number?
As it turns out, Stamboel has a way around this as well, and aided by the mix of traditional and modern instrumentation in Ricky Lionardi’s impressive score, the choreography is ominous enough. It’s when he closes in on the dancers’ anguished, agonised faces that you know this isn’t Seven Brides for Seven Brothers – and that’s before he unleashes some bone-cracking body horror reminiscent of Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria. Dancing Village: The Curse Begins doesn’t vault all the hurdles of prequelitis as nimbly as it does this, and the two-hour-plus run-time is clearly tailored to an audience who are already hungry for as much of this story as they can get. There are a few moments which I suspect will mean more to them than us, but this film is lavish and confidently made, and the central acting duel between Sarah and Maudy Effrosina’s Mila is compelling enough to carry you along.
Dancing Village: the Curse Begins is out now on Shudder UK
Graham’s Archive – Dancing Village: The Curse Begins
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