Suzzanna: The Queen of Black Magic offers an excellent introduction to the Indonesian movie legend, but it’s a fun watch even if you’re already familiar with her work. Just about the only prerequisite for enjoyment is being a horror fan, because David Gregory’s documentary is packed with clips from Suzzanna’s gloriously over-the-top filmography, especially her much-loved early-’80s entries.
“The Queen of Indonesian Horror,” 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’t truly ascend to her genre throne until the 1980s, when she starred in a series of gruesome shriekers playing characters—inevitably, a woman who rises from the grave in search of vengeance—based on well-known monsters from Indonesian folklore.
As you’d expect, Suzzanna: The Queen of Black Magic explores the life and career of Suzanna Martha Frederika van Osch—she was half-Dutch, which explains the last name. But it also digs into her impact on Indonesian cinema by touching on the country’s complicated political and cultural history, particularly as it ran alongside her rise to fame. It’s context that adds so much more to her story—as does the film’s 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.
And speaking of those performances, while Suzzanna—as she was credited on-screen; she added a “z” to make her name sound more mysterious—had beauty and talent, she also had an inherent spooky quality that, as contemporary Indonesian horror director Joko Anwar says in the documentary, puts her on a level with Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, and Bela Lugosi. Her eyes—haunting, mournful, electric—were her trademark, and as a fan points out here, “She could play a role with just her gaze.”
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.
Throughout the documentary, it’s 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’s also a Javanese mythology professor. This perspective helps viewers who aren’t 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’s revenge against a particularly deserving man, but Indonesia’s cruel upper classes also felt the sting of her wrath, which further elevated her to hero status among her fans.
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.
If you notice he still looks rather young, that’s because, as we later find out, they met when he was playing her teenage son in Sankuriang. They married despite their significant age difference—and then co-starred in another film, again as mother and son!—and the romance led to inheritance-adjacent tension with Suzzanna’s daughter and son-in-law. That rift later erupted into violence and what appears to be an ongoing feud even after her death.
It’s messy drama—with Suzzanna’s reaction to it captured by an emotional showing for the press—that still can’t overshadow what’s contained in Suzzanna’s filmography. But it does make Suzzanna: The Queen of Black Magic a documentary that has more twists and turns than your typical restrospective.
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’ll be difficult to resist immediately diving right into them after you glimpse all the clips teasing their lurid delights.
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