Indonesian horror might be lesser known than that of some other international horror destinations, but for fans of weirdness it is not to be missed. Satan’s Bed is a re-imagining of A Nightmare on Elm Street, with a possible soupçon of Phantasm, and a big helping of Poltergeist mixed in.

Merry and her cousin Nina (not Tina) live with Merry’s mom, whose problem is that she has a married boyfriend before she remembers she’s supposed to be Ronee Blakely and starts drinking a lot. Nina dreams about being drowned in the bathtub by a guy with knives on a glove before being killed all alone in a bedroom with Rudy (not Rod) post-coitus. Merry’s dad, a policeman, suspects Rudy, and Rudy is hanged by an unseen force on the gates of Merry’s house and not in a cell. Everyone dreams of a guy with knives on his hand and mud on his face, and a bucket lying in a hallway. Yes, a bucket, in the middle of the hall in all the dream sequences where someone’s walking through a mysterious building that’s not a boiler room.

Nina appears to Merry in cellophane as a pocong, which is a specific type of Indonesian ghost wrapped in a shroud that’s usually white and knotted at the top. A cinematic pocong can actually be quite creepy, as was Tina in her body bag in the original movie, but Nina’s ghost looks more like a pre-fab Easter basket.

As in every Indonesian horror, there’s a servant with bad teeth, a big tree, people at a funeral holding black umbrellas on a sunny day, and a mansion in the boonies. And of course there are two or three priests who try to defeat the ghosts by swirling and flying away into another dimension while holding a bucket of coals. One of them gets his dick bitten by a ghost!

What sets this movie apart is that there’s a prologue with a white couple and their Indonesian children being shot to death in Merry’s house at Christmas in the 1940s while singing carols. The dad then becomes the Freddy mudface character, and the mom is his accomplice who strangles people; I think she might be the Phantasm reference because of the lady in lavender being another form of the Tall Man. Besides dick biting and strangling and stabbing, these ghosts can also rip off their own heads. The heads don’t fly around with entrails attached though, which is a bummer.

I would like to tell you why the people were shot at the beginning, but the subtitles disappeared halfway through the movie, removing any possible explanation of anything. But the truth is you don’t need subs to watch an Indonesian horror movie, you just let the art flow over you.

What I can be sure of is that Satan’s Bed turns from NOES into Poltergeist at the end, with the flashing lights in the house and skeletons popping out of coffins in the front yard as Merry’s dad tries to rescue the survivors in his car that has trouble starting.

Oddly, one of the priests then defeats the ghosts (maybe) by using a cross, which is unusual since Indonesian horror movies usually feature Islamic symbolism. I guess it’s because the ghosts were Christians, given they died while singing carols.

How can I wrap this up? In cellophane or white cloth? It might have been better if I had had subtitles for more than half the movie, but then again it might have made no difference. If you saw Satan’s Slave, the 1980 Indonesian Phantasm, or its impressive 2017 prequel Satan’s Slaves, you need to find Satan’s Bed and lie in it for 90 minutes or so. Wear protective underwear and as always don’t fall asleep.