1 Sakti reconsidered: Power and the disenchantment of the world. * Professor Adrian Vickers The University of Sydney Unedited version of the text published in Southeast Asian Perspectives on Power, ed. L. Chua, J. Cook, N. Long, L. Wilson, pp. 51-66. London: Routledge 2012 (ISBN 978-0-415-68345-6 hbk; 978-0-203-12312-6 ebk). The horror genre in Indonesian film and television has burgeoned at the same time that public expressions of rationality have seemingly undermined belief in what might be called ‘magic power’. The first significant account of Indonesian public discourse on ‘magic power’ or sakti was Benedict Anderson’s famous article on power in Java, an article that blurred traditional Javanese and Balinese concepts of sakti with Sukarnoist ideology. More recently two Indonesian scholars, Onghokham and Nyoman Darma Putra, have identified further changes in the ways that sakti is conceptualised, identifying its problematic relationship with forms of modernity. Drawing on the work of these three scholars, I attempt to demonstrate the relationship between notions of magical power and changing forms of commodity relations in Indonesia. I argue that sakti has been made more ‘concrete’ in popular forms such as films, at the same time that it has shifted away from discussions of place and space in sites in Bali. In the 2007 Indonesian film Hantu (Ghost), five young, urban wealthy people go on a hiking expedition. On the way they see a trance performance called debus, one not staged for the camera, but rather the West Javanese version of kind of travelling show that is still common throughout the island. From the village where the performance is stages, despite the advice of locals, they venture into a mountain forest, where they encounter mysterious creatures that possess the two female members of the group, and ultimately kill all but one. These young people are initially sceptical about the existence of ghosts, but soon learn otherwise. The five at first witness the debus before they go up to the forest looking for a lake called “Setra Wingit” (Javanese for ‘Haunted Graveyard’—a bit of a give-away). The debus prefigures possession that occurs later in the film, when the main Witch/Ghost figure, a creature with long matted hair, possesses at different times the two young women of the group, Rinjani (the name of the high volcano in Lombok) and Maya (Sanskrit and Javanese, ‘Illusion’). Despite the atmosphere being leavened by semi- comic reactions to the terrifying situation of being in the dark wood, eventually two of three young men are dragged down into the graveyard and killed by the ghosts. The third, Galih (Javanese, ‘Bones’), the leader of the group, is saved by Rinjani, who helps him get to the safety of a house outside the wood, because she loves him. The woman in this house, however, cannot see Rinjani, and we are shown that she was already dead before she led Galih out. The ‘ghost’ of the title refers both to her and the all-destroying creatures found in the forest. Horror films have existed in Indonesia since the 1930s, some of them have drawn directly on such narratives as the Calon Arang (in a lost Italian film of the 1930s), and became popular in the 1990s. i With the fall of Suharto the once-dominant film genre,