Slasher aesthetic

The slasher aesthetic renders the graphic murder of the six generals at the hands of a communist mob, their genitals mutilated in a sadomasochistic orgy perpetrated by members of the PKI-affiliated Gerwani (Women's Movement) burnt with cigarettes, slashed with razor blades, stabbed with bayonets, beaten with rifle butts, all to the accompaniment of wild chanting and drums.

The expose and the slasher are both forms predicated on an explicit and excessive visibility. In the expose this takes the form of an insistence on the self-evidence of its images... The excess of the slasher insists that we see everything, reveling in the generic gore of a projected PKI sadism. This grotesque excess operates in interesting ways. It is not merely designed to elicit a common outrage for the PKI, but to create a scene of sacrificial and ritual participation. And, as spectacle, the violence fascinates.

... For all its excessively visible violence, the film withholds from view the true force of the violence which it performs -- that of the massacres.

...The subsequent murder of at least half a million people goes unmentioned, and yet itis this unspoken terror that provides the film with a certain mystique, a frisson and fascination.

-- Joshua Oppenheimer, Killer Images, p. 289-90