Producership, Characterization, and Gender Representation in the Luna Maya Suzzanna Horror Franchise, Indonesia 1981–2023
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33292/locus.v3i01.25Keywords:
characterization, film franchise, gender representation, producership, promotional strategyAbstract
Indonesian horror cinema has moved over the past decade from single-film production towards franchise production, yet scholarship on this shift has continued to treat textual analysis and industrial analysis as separate undertakings. This article examines how producership, directorial characterization, and gender representation together sustain the Luna Maya Suzzanna franchise, produced by Soraya Intercine Films since 2018. Three films are compared: Sundelbolong (1981, Sisworo Gautama Putra), which serves as the baseline for the original icon, and the two franchise titles led by Luna Maya, Bernapas dalam Kubur (2018, Rocky Soraya and Anggy Umbara) and Malam Jumat Kliwon (2023, Guntur Soeharjanto). The study combines close textual analysis of the three films with a corpus of some thirty-five publicly circulated paratexts published between 2018 and 2024, including producer and director interviews, press-conference reports, trailers, and reviews. Material was coded in two passes against the physiological, psychological, and sociological dimensions of characterization and triangulated across independent sources. The character retains a stable basic structure across all three films, that of a wronged woman who returns as a vengeful supernatural force, while variation concentrates in the sociological dimension, moving from domestic betrayal in the first franchise film to family economic pressure in the second. The producer sustains iconic identity through consistent casting, visual and narrative reference to the original Suzzanna titles, and the recurring presence of veteran supporting performers, while promotion frames every release as the return of the horror queen. Character thus operates simultaneously as a narrative unit and as an industrial asset managed across changes of director.
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Filmography
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