With his blood-soaked tales of violence and vengeance like The Night Comes for Us and Headshot, Timo Tjahjanto earned a reputation as one of the world’s goriest action directors. But he doesn’t see himself that way.
Tjahjanto began his filmmaking career making slasher movies as half of the Mo brothers, teaming up with his longtime friend Kimo Stamboel. Since the end of their formal partnership, the Mo brothers have largely worked on their own projects, with Stamboel working in the horror genre and Tjahjanto primarily (but not exclusively) making violent action movies.
Tjahjanto took the action world by storm with 2018’s The Night Comes for Us, a brutal thriller led by two of Indonesian cinema’s foremost martial arts stars, Iko Uwais and Joe Taslim. The movie occasionally gets labeled as “action horror,” in spite of its fairly conventional crime-thriller narrative, because of how unflinchingly Tjahjanto depicts extreme, bone-breaking, blood-soaked violence. The stylish, carnage-filled fight sequences left a mark on action cinema other directors are still scrambling to match.
His new movie, The Shadow Strays, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, and finally dropped on Netflix on Oct. 17. It follows a teenage soldier who is being trained as a member of an elite group of top-secret assassins called the Shadows. When a mission goes wrong, she’s sidelined by the Shadows and gets entangled in a dispute between her young neighbor and local gangsters. Like most Tjahjanto projects, the film features several decapitations and “gallons” of blood. (The director estimated 85% of the blood was practical — like many splatter fans, the man loves squibs.) It’s also one of 2024’s best action movies.
But Tjahjanto doesn’t consider himself a particularly gory filmmaker — he sees his movies as a way to be honest about real-world consequences of violence. A self-described “indulgent” filmmaker, Tjahjanto — wearing a Nine Inch Nails shirt and feeling “exhausted and relieved” after recently wrapping filming on the upcoming Nobody 2 — spoke with Polygon about his approach to gore in action, his cinematic influences, and sticking with practical blood when the rest of the industry is moving to CG effects.
This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
Polygon: I think of you as one of the gorier action directors working today. Do you see yourself that way?
Timo Tjahjanto: I don’t know. I don’t really think so. Granted, I haven’t seen them — not because I don’t want to see them, but just because of the timing of it all and the accessibility of it all — but I’ve heard there are films like Kill and Project Wolf Hunting that seem to be doing quite OK in that department. From what little clips I’ve seen, they seem to be way bloodier.
I think there was a phase in my life — when I just started as a filmmaker, I did this little film with Kimo [Stamboel], my friend. It’s called Macabre, one of the first Indonesian slasher films. And I think at the time, our goal was like, Let’s be the goriest Indonesian flick ever. But weirdly, after The Night Comes for Us and everything, I just don’t feel like I was necessarily aiming for gore. I think it’s just that there needs to be a certain, weirdly enough, respect to violence and what it can do to the human body. I feel like we have to, in some way, hold ourselves accountable as filmmakers to show just how traumatizing violence can be.
We live in a violent world. If you see what’s on the internet, what’s on formerly known as Twitter, X, just the accessibility of violent content — people from a lot of parts of America, for example, there’s a lot of people getting riled up and start beating each other up for nothing. Not that I’m saying America is the only violent place. I think the world generally has become a much more violent place, or much more exposed to the media. It’s weird when people see my films like, Holy shit, that’s so gory and violent! I’m like, Man, have you seen the real world? It’s so fucking crazy out there that I feel like sometimes my film is a PG version of it.
I’m glad you brought up the respect for violence, because one of the reasons I’m drawn to your approach to gore in action is because it feels more honest. If you’re not showing that level of destruction, you’re sanitizing the violence, and not being honest with the viewer about the actual effects of what’s happening.
That’s what I always try to do. I think the human body is weirdly fragile and resilient at the same time. If any of your bones have been broken, or if you’ve ever had a deep cut, it’s so weird how biology reacts to it all.
But beyond that, gore can also add stakes to a scene, it can add excitement, it can add humor. How do you balance those elements?
Well, that’s the thing. I think at a certain level, violence has to become funny. And I learned this from, or I copied this from, the great Takashi Miike. I think he’s always walking that line, realizing that the world is a crazy, fucked-up place, and one way you can deal with it is by using a lot of humor. If you watch something like Ichi the Killer, for example, that thing is dark, man. In Takashi Miike’s world, everything is fair and square. Women, men, we are both capable of violence, and we are both capable of being the victim. And I try to do that in my films.
Polygon.
