As one of the programmers of the upcoming New York Asian Film Festival, I’ve spent the last six months watching slapstick comedies from Malaysia, war epics from Thailand, and crime films from the Philippines. The festival’s mission is to bring over movies that are hits in their home countries but too populist and genre-oriented to make it onto America’s ever-shrinking art-house circuit.

After seven years of programming, I’ve split Asia up like a giant video store: Action films are from Thailand, period epics are from China, teen angst is from Japan, and, surprisingly, horror is from Indonesia. That country’s big box-office hit last year, “Kala,” was a slick, film noir conspiracy thriller full of black sedans, fedoras, trench coats … and demons. The combo would be jarring if Indonesia didn’t already have a long history of horror movies stuffed full of funky ghouls. But there is a trove of wonderfully creepy tales of terror, going back decades, residing in the Asian nation, and luckily for Americans, the DVD label Mondo Macabro has dedicated itself to releasing beautifully restored editions of Indonesian horror and fantasy films from the 1970s and ’80s. The label’s most recent release, “Queen of Black Magic” (1979), is yet another of that country’s bestiaries of the weird.

After Suharto took power in 1967, he jump-started the Indonesian economy with his “New Order” and simultaneously loosened censorship restrictions on local films so they could better compete against foreign product. Six years later, a new law required distributors to produce one Indonesian film for every three foreign films they imported, and Indonesian cinema exploded from 10 local movies in 1969 to 134 in 1977. The budgets were low and the acting made up in enthusiasm what it lacked in finesse, but the filmmakers had access to a head-spinning array of potent material. Indonesian pop and folk culture overflows with legendary heroes, black magic, and grotesque monsters, such as witches who can send their heads flying off into the night with their internal organs dangling beneath like the tentacles of a jellyfish. Indonesian cinema quickly became a delivery device for trippy nightmares.

In the early 1980s, Barry Prima emerged as the major male star thanks to his roles as the nationalist hero Jaka Sembung in “The Warrior” (1981) and its sequels. But it was Suzzanna who came to rule the screen with her recurring role as the evil Snake Queen. She’s the titular Queen in “Queen of Black Magic,” falsely accused of witchcraft and tossed off a cliff by her ex-husband on his wedding night. She plummets through the air and lands at the feet of an old hermit, who presents her with a proposition: Why not become the evil witch she’s already accused of being? One blood shower later, she’s the Queen of Black Magic, sending swarms of bees after the man who killed her, causing her lover to tear off his own head (which subsequently flies around and bites people), and cursing one unlucky villager with enormous boils that explode in a shower of gore.

Suzzanna is gravitas itself, channeling late-period Joan Crawford, and the horror is plentiful, weird, and wet. But there’s a huge gap between intention and execution in Indonesian horror. When you look at the Snake Queen you may see a woman in heavy eyeliner wearing a polyester robe and a wig made of rubber snakes. But Indonesians see the legendary daughter of the Queen of the South Seas who traffics in human souls and rewards seekers with great wealth. The purveyors of Indonesia’s performing arts don’t value naturalism the way Western artists do, preferring instead to give their audiences stylized representations of the essence of gods and monsters. For Indonesian viewers, this cultural bias toward theatricality allows them to more easily bridge the gap between the bargain-basement special effects on-screen and the burning, larger-than-life figures in their imaginations.

But even for Western viewers, the mix of fear and respect with which women are treated in these cheap, sometimes sleazy films is resonant. Throughout Indonesian cinema, women often play the monsters, and Indonesian horror movies constantly re-enact a morality play wherein wronged women seek revenge and unleash chaos before the patriarchy steps in and restores the natural order. The trend reached its climax in “Lady Terminator” (1988), in which a young female archaeologist is possessed by the wicked Queen of the South Seas — represented by an eel that swims, uninvited, up her birth canal, transforming her into an indestructible killing machine — and stomps through Jakarta, machine-gunning every last pig of a man. This slab of ’80s cheese was so popular that the government deemed it a threat, shut the film down after nine days, and rewrote the nation’s censorship laws.

While the seams are showing on the special effects, some things speak across all cultural barriers, and the image of a woman in black leather emptying her M-16 into a cop’s crotch, then kicking his corpse before striding off into the night to unleash more hell, is the kind of thing that delivers a thrill of pure, exploitation energy, no matter where in the world you are.