Impetigore

Maya and Dini are friends who work as tollbooth collectors. One night at work, Maya is attacked by a man wielding a golok. Her assailant claims to be from the village of Harjosari and calls Maya by another name, Rahayu.

Following the inscription on an old photo showing a young Maya with a couple in front of a large house, Maya and Dini travel to the remote Harjosari to look for the house in hopes of selling it for money.

At Harjosari, the pair encounters cold, suspicious villagers. They witness funerals taking place daily and observe that many headstones in the cemetery belong to children. Dini is lured away by villagers who slit her throat and skin her, mistaking her for Rahayu whose parents owned the house.

At night, Maya spies village leader Saptadi drowning a skinless newborn infant. She finds out from a sympathetic villager, Ratih, that 20 years ago, a rich wayang kulit artist was rumored to have made a pact with the devil to heal his daughter Rahayu who was born without skin. Since then, all babies in the village have been born skinless. The villagers are persuaded by Saptadi to believe that Rahayu/Maya must be skinned to stop the curse.

The spirit of one of the little girls murdered by the wayang artist for her skin reveals to Maya that the actual way to end the curse is to bury the skins of the slain children together with their bones. The ghost also reveals that Rahayu was born skinless because Saptadi’s shaman mother had cursed the baby who was conceived from an adulterous affair between Saptadi and Rahayu’s mother.

Maya buries the wayang puppets made out of dead children’s skin and the victims’ spirits are pacified. She is captured by the villagers and, begging for her life, tells Saptadi that he is her biological father. Full of remorse, Saptadi kills himself as a healthy baby is finally born in the village. Out of guilt, Saptadi's mother kills herself too. Maya escapes as the villagers celebrate the first healthy birth in 20 years.

One year later, the wife has a violent miscarriage as it is shown that the spirit of Saptadi's mother has devoured the impending child, thus indicating the start of a much more horrific curse on the village.

In 2011, director Joko Anwar revealed a poster for the film which simultaneously announced as one of several planned films,[8] although the project was canceled due to the large number of films produced by Lifelike Pictures which initially produced the film. This film project began to find a bright spot seven years later when Ivanhoe Pictures announced a collaboration with Anwar through three films, including this film with two other titles, Ghost in the Cell and The Vow.[9] He announced on his Instagram account the film title changes, which was originally Impetigore to Perempuan Tanah Jahanam on December 31, 2018. He added that it will be different from his previous horror film Satan's Slaves (2017).[10] The filming process took places in villages around Malang, Gempol, Lumbang, Bromo, Lumajang, Ijen, and Banyuwangi.[11] In February 2019, Anwar announced a number of artists who played this film, including Tara Basro, Christine Hakim, Marissa Anita, Asmara Abigail, Ario Bayu, Kiki Narendra, Teuku Rifnu Wikana, Zidni Hakim, Faradina Mufti, Abdurahman Arif, Mian Tiara, Eka Nusa Pertiwi, Aghniny Haque, Arswendy Bening Swara, Ramadhan Al Rasyid, and Ical Tanjung.

• List of submissions to the 93rd Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film
• List of Indonesian submissions for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film

• Impetigore at AllMovie
• Impetigore at IMDb
• Impetigore at Rotten Tomatoes