The shaman, the jinn, and the woman who wrote about them

Sariah Wan Jaafar made her mark in horror with the cult hit ‘Aku Haus Darah Mu’, a 2017 horror mystery she produced through her production company Tsar Asia. (Andrea Edmonds @ FMT Lifestyle)

PETALING JAYA: It was close to three in the morning when Sariah Wan Jaafar awoke with a start. She turned her head slowly, afraid of what she might see.

Three figures stood at the foot of her bed, watching her – shapes too dark to belong to the living.

Every instinct screamed for her to run, but she couldn’t. All she could do was whisper every holy word she knew. When she finally dared to wake her husband, what he said made the blood drain from her face.

“He looked at the clock and went, ‘Okay, I know.’ And I was like, ‘What do you know?’” Sariah recalled with disbelief.

Her husband, a filmmaker, casually revealed that he’d used a real spell in one of his projects. When the drama became a hit, curious fans decided to test it themselves. That night, as the clock struck the same hour the onscreen curse had unfolded, something answered.

Sariah, a TV and film producer turned author of the chilling debut novel “The Shaman’s Circle”, is no stranger to the eerie and supernatural.

“A lot of creepy things happened to me when I was younger, as well as when I was in college,” she admitted, albeit reluctantly. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that her first novel draws deeply from that same unsettling world.

“The Shaman’s Circle” weaves two haunting tales across time. In 19th-century Tana Toraja, a shaman named Minah strikes a deadly pact with a jinn called Siblis. Over a century later in Malaysia, Julia, desperate to be a mother, unknowingly awakens that same vengeful spirit.

Jinns, shapeshifters, and other creepy supernatural beings will terrorise you in ‘The Shaman’s Circle’. (Freepik pic)

Blending Southeast Asian folklore and horror, Sariah’s novel explores the thin line between faith and fear – and how the dead never rest when debts go unpaid.

From Indonesia to Malaysia, Sariah conjures the region’s lurking demons: the aswang, toyol, witch doctors, and jinns.

“We Malaysians love these stories because we grew up with them,” said Sariah, who spent five years writing the novel. “Hollywood has vampires and werewolves, but we have pontianak and pocong, and that’s scarier, because you might have lived it.”

That deep fascination with local horror took root years earlier, during the filming of a spooky travel series Sariah’s production company was commissioned to produce in 2016.

“Our quest was to find a bomoh who could make the dead move in Toraja, Indonesia,” she recalled.

“A local family hosted us – and their late grandmother was still in the house. The Torajans keep their dead for years, and this family offered, ‘If you find the bomoh, you can move our grandma.’”

It sounded like something out of a horror script. But they found the bomoh. The cameras rolled. The chants began. And when the ritual reached its climax, the dead grandmother’s leg twitched. Once. Then again.

The crew bolted. Their hosts screamed. And somewhere in the chaos, the line between myth and documentary blurred.

The novel ‘The Shaman’s Circle’ was inspired by an incident Sariah’s husband and their crew encountered in Indonesia. (Andrea Edmonds @ FMT Lifestyle)

When Sariah’s husband later recounted the story, she was less terrified than intrigued. What if this became a story? she thought. Not a retelling, but something inspired by that night.

“The bomoh said something very interesting,” she recalled. “He said if you ask for something from dark forces, you have to give something back.” That chilling line became the seed for Siblis, the demon that wreaks havoc in “The Shaman’s Circle”.

Initially, Sariah envisioned it as a TV series – “something dark, like what you’d see on HBO or Netflix.” But when the project fell through, the idea refused to die. It haunted her, whispering to be told another way.

So she took the scripts, the structure, the shadows – and turned them into chapters. That’s how the novel was born.

“I’m so grateful to Penguin Books,” Sariah said. “When I sent them the manuscript, I didn’t expect them to get back to me.

“I’ve heard so many stories of first-time writers who end up self-publishing because nobody picks them. So when Penguin said yes, I thought it was a joke!”

With the book now out in the world, Sariah hopes it shines a light on Malaysia’s storytelling power. “We are the masters of horror,” she declared. “Hollywood has nothing on us.”

‘The Shaman’s Circle’ is out now in major bookstores.