From Folklore to Film: Representation and Mediatization of Kuyang in Contemporary Indonesian Horror Cinema
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.38194/jurkom.v9i2.1613Keywords:
Folklore, Horror Cinema, Mediatization, Representation, KuyangAbstract
Banjar folklore figure Kuyang is transformed and represented in Indonesian horror film Kuyank (2026) and traditionally circulating through oral storytelling and collective memory, Kuyang functioned as a moral-regulative narrative within communal communication. Its adaptation into cinema reflects a shift in communicative authority and symbolic meaning. Based on Stuart Hall’s representation theory, Couldry and Hepp’s mediatization model and Barbara Creed’s monstrous feminine concept, qualitative textual analysis is used to investigate narrative structure, visualization and promotional narratives. The results uncover three shifts: ontological (from the imagined folkloric creature to a visualized monster), functional-relational (from moral narrative to commercial spectacle), and institutional (from collectively transmission to centralized media production). The paper claims that cinema is involved in the performance and reconstruction of folklore in line with genre formulas and market strategies.
References
Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Anchor Books.
Couldry, N., & Hepp, A. (2017). The mediated construction of reality. Polity Press.
Creed, B. (1993). The monstrous-feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis. Routledge.
Erll, A. (2011). Memory in culture. Palgrave Macmillan.
Hall, S. (2013). The work of representation. In S. Hall, J. Evans, & S. Nixon (Eds.), Representation (2nd ed., pp. 1–59). Sage.
Hepp, A. (2020). Deep mediatization. Routledge.
Olick, J. K., & Robbins, J. (1998). Social memory studies: From “collective memory” to the historical sociology of mnemonic practices. Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 105–140.
Prabowo, A. (2021). Gendered horror in contemporary Indonesian film. Asian Cinema, 32(1), 77–94.
Radstone, S. (2017). Memory and media. Memory Studies, 10(1), 9–22.
Santoso, R. (2018). Myth, media, and modernity in Southeast Asian horror. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 49(3), 389–405.
Setiawan, B. (2019). Local myth and Indonesian horror cinema. Jurnal Komunikasi Indonesia, 8(2), 145–160.
Suryana, L. (2022). Folklore adaptation in digital media. Media and Communication Studies, 14(3), 211–226.
Wibowo, A. (2020). Cultural commodification in Indonesian popular cinema. Komunikator, 12(1), 33–48.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Noviana Sari
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain the copyright and grant the journal the right of first publication of the work, simultaneously licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
