Perhaps the most significant development in horror films since the year 2000 is the dramatic impact that filmmakers from outside of the US are having on the genre. Japan’s “J-Horror”, the French Extremity, and the horror-inflected fantasies of Mexico’s Guillermo del Toro all found audiences ready to try something different after the often underwhelming output of the 1990’s. Superb movies from this period like The Others (Spain), A Tale of Two Sisters (Korea), Let the Right One In (Sweden), and The Babadook (Australia) attest to the fact that excellent genre films are coming from all over the world.
The venerable Michigan Theater took the globalist trend a distinct step further in October of 2019 by hosting Halaloween, which, as far as I can tell, is the first ever festival with a lineup comprised entirely of horror films from Muslim countries like Turkey, Indonesia, and Tunisia. The festival was produced by The University of Michigan’s Global Islamic Studies Center.
Here are a few impressions of the films that were screened, along with excerpts from an interview with Karla Mallette, the Director of the Global Islamic Studies Center.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
Iranian-American director Ana Lily Amirpour strikes me as the kid who always liked to color outside the lines. At its base A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is the story of a young female vampire known only as The Girl. She resides in a mythical place called Bad City. The setting is not precisely located, but everyone speaks Persian. The Girl maintains a food, not friends relationship with Bad City’s male populace, and sports a bit of a mean streak. The terrible beauty of her “are you a good boy?” interrogation of a young street kid leaving him scarred for life is worth the price of admission.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is available to stream on Amazon:
Rich black and white cinematography add spot on 40’s noir-ish touches, highlighting the desolation of Bad City, while Amirpour delights in big, wide, camera shots suggestive of a spaghetti western. A primary character presents as an Iranian James Dean and drives a 50’s vintage T-Bird. The Girl is shown, alone in her room, moodily dancing to the synth pop of Farah’s Dancing Girls. This style mash-up approach is epitomized by the famous image of The Girl silently skateboarding late at night while wearing a traditional Iranian chador.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night may not even be a horror movie. Amirpour prefers to call it a fairytale. But whatever it is, I found it fresh and eminently watchable.
You can check out Horror Homeroom’s review of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night here.
Ritual (2012)
This Indonesian film directed by the well-regarded Joko Anwar starts out with promise. He drops the audience directly into the plight of a man whose ID says that he is John Evans and who emerges from a shallow grave with amnesia. His struggle to find his bearings is consigned to the back burner when an unseen assailant attacks and then stalks him through the first fifty minutes of the movie. The jungle setting and pacing works for about a half an hour, but then the repeated scenes of running punctuated with solitary outbursts by John start to lose steam. But director Anwar has a plan for that.
Ritual is streaming on Amazon:
For its final act, Ritual takes the sharpest of left turns with its story, upending all that came before. It is a bold twist, and the success of the film for a given viewer depends totally upon it. Unfortunately, for me it did not work. While it does provide the missing pieces to Ritual’s story puzzle, its depiction of brutal violence without clear motivation renders the movie a vacuous exercise in style.
Siccin 4 (2017)
This entry from the very popular Turkish franchise is the festival’s one straight up, mainstream horror film. Its story of a family, forced by financial troubles, to move in with the grandmother is a haunted house movie on jet skis. Director Alper Mestci quickly and efficiently introduces the characters (mother, father, sister, brother, grandmother, and creepy caretaker Aunt Rahime), covers some plot points from the point of view of the adolescent daughter Hilal, (excellently played by Merve Ates), and then takes the audience on a most entertaining roller coaster ride.
Mestci has a real flair for creating dread-inducing moments, and the hits keep on coming right until the end of the movie. Especially noteworthy is his use of the oft-maligned jump scare. In Siccin 4 they are so well executed that they really take the movie to a higher level.
Some of the plot details are at times murky, but it doesn’t detract from the overall experience. There is a is big confrontation at the end that sets things right, but since we are already up to Siccin 6 in the series I suspect that the spirit world has some unfinished business with we humans. Based on Siccin 4 I hope the other films in the series become available to western audiences.
Dachra (2018)
Touted as the first horror film originating from Tunisia, it is also a most assured debut effort by director Abdelhamid Bouchnak. Three self-absorbed college students are doing a documentary about urban legend Mongia, a victim of a brutal attack, who has been hidden in an asylum for 20 years and is rumored to be a witch. After a harrowing face-to-face meeting that definitely does not clear up the witch issue, their search leads to a hidden village. The students believe that it may hold the key to unravelling the mystery. However, the investigation soon takes a back seat to a battle for their survival.
Bouchnak cites The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) as a big influence and this is apparent in Dachra. Both films follow a group of young people whose modernity offers little protection from virulent evil. But unlike the aggressive, full-on assault that is Chainsaw, Bouchnak places the students in a slow downward spiral. By the time that they realize they are dealing with a cadre of cannibalistic witches, they are already in way over their heads.
Halaloween’s darkest offering reiterates one of the key concepts of modern horror, one that applies equally well in Texas or Tunisia. It says that the conjuring of a jinn, ghost, or vampire can’t compete with the horrors that can be inflicted on us by other people.
Under the Shadow (2016)
This film won the Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer award at the 2017 BAFTAs, which is the British Oscars. It is set in Tehran in the 1980’s during the Iran / Iraq War. The first act provides a glimpse into post Cultural Revolution Iran through the eyes of a young woman named Shideh (Narges Rashidi). In the opening scene she is rejected for medical school because she was politically active years earlier. When she gets home, her doctor husband informs her that he has received orders to the front, leaving Shideh alone with their daughter, Dorsa. When a strange, mute orphan boy comes to live in her apartment building and an undetonated missile crashes into the roof, the neighbors start confiding to Shideh that a jinn might be about.
Under the Shadow is streaming on Amazon:
Shideh reads a passage from a borrowed book saying that jinn are attracted to places where there is an abundance of fear and anxiety. Knowing this, the only surprising thing about the jinn in Under the Shadow is that it took so long to show up. At this point the horror elements kick in but director Babak Anvari continues to interweave the immediate threat from the jinn with the soul grinding reality of everyday life in Tehran.
While Under the Shadow is a creepily effective story of a jinn invasion, its horror gains potency because some of its most disturbing scenes occur when the monster is nowhere to be found.
You can check out Horror Homeroom’s review of Under the Shadow here.
Halaloween presented a unique opportunity for audiences to experience a richly diverse program of genre films from the Muslim world. It shows once again how horror movies have truly become World Cinema. Here’s hoping that it becomes a holiday tradition.
Here are excerpts from my interview with Karla Mallette, the Director of the Global Islamic Studies Center at the University of Michigan about Halaloween.
R: I’d like to begin by asking about the origins of Halaloween as an idea and where it came from, whose idea was it? And how did it get started?
K: Originally it was my idea. We always develop our programming by tossing ideas around, spit-balling and thinking through things. I thought it would be great to do a series of horror movies from the Muslim world, really global, and I just tossed it out thinking it would be a great idea, but very, very difficult to do, maybe impossible. Then I started to talk to people, colleagues here at the International Institute and learned right away, because we didn’t know if there were enough to fill out a film series, learned right away that there is this whole category of Jinn possession movies that come from Southeast Asia and that was my first inkling that there was something there and I started to investigate it and I did a deep dive into YouTube because a lot of these movies are on YouTube. The program coordinator from the Global Islamic Studies Center, Hannah Mata, also got involved at a certain point and she also started digging and looking for titles. I watched a lot of movies, a lot of crap, and I watched some really interesting stuff too. It convinced me that there is a category there.
R: Regarding the mechanics and logistics of it, did you just go to a distributor to get the rights to show the films. How did you do that part?
K: We worked with the Michigan Theater, it is actually a service that they offer for a modest fee they will secure the rights for you. There are a couple of movies that we were interested in screening and just couldn’t track down the distribution people, production team people to get the rights to screen them but they are movies that we have in reserve maybe for next year if we do this again.
R: I’m thinking that some of the films have never been shown in the United States before. I don’t know if that’s really true or not.
K: Yeah, it is unlikely. So for instance Siccin 4, the Turkish one, they were so easy to work with, they were so enthusiastic and they let us screen it for free. Don’t ask why, but they did. They retweeted our tweets and liked our Instagram posts. They were very supportive. Ritual, the Indonesian movie, I think they were just kind of surprised that we managed to find them. We ended up having to buy our own Blu-ray copy because it was too hard to get a physical copy here, which is fine. Not expensive at all and easy enough to do. So it was a different experience with the different films.
R: Why did you choose horror as opposed to drama, mystery, comedy, or any other genre. Why did you choose that as the conduit to explore Muslim experience or Muslim perspectives to show to a primarily American audience?
K: I am a fan. I do like horror movies. That was kind of the first impetus and what we really wanted to do was to do a series where kids would come whether they were Muslim or not. They would come just out of curiosity because of the content. Non-Muslim kids could have a window into the Muslim world. They are there to see a horror movie, they are there to be scared primarily, but as a side benefit they also have a window into the Muslim world. And the Muslim kids could have fun seeing a wide range of expression, because a lot of kids know their own culture, but an inherent Muslim won’t know anything about Indonesian Islam, or Turkish Islam so we thought it would be nice for them to have a mirror to an adjacent culture. The whole thing fits together so nicely with Halloween and the horror movies are so popular with college kids. You have seen the audiences yourself, they are very young. Our normal programming at the University we don’t get that kind of turnout, we don’t get that many kids. That’s what is exciting about it for us.
R: Do you recall the first horror film you ever saw? Or the first one that made an impression on you.
K: I remember the first one that I made my kid watch because she has never forgiven me for it. It was “Nightmare on Elm Street”.
R: How old was she?
K: She was 11 or so. I think old enough but she was kind of traumatized.
R: How were the films selected? Is it basically through your own research going through a bunch of films until you hit on ones that you felt would be a good fit?
K: Yes. And I was also looking for coverage. I wanted it to be as global as possible. We had two Iranian movies, kind of. A Girl Walks Home is actually an American movie…
R: But Amirpour is an Iranian American director, so there is that. And the film is in Persian. Even though it’s a fantasy setting and you are not really given a specific locale I think you are intended to think that it is an Iranian setting or at least a Muslim world setting.
K: It is culturally supposed to be Iran, although it was filmed in California.
R: Regarding the concept of halal (meaning permissible) versus haram (meaning forbidden, bad, unhealthy), do you think that in Muslim society that scary movies would be considered halal or haram?
K: That was one of the questions that we started out asking. I actually asked the program coordinator “Are horror movies halal” and we googled it. She is Egyptian and she thought they were not, she thought they were haram because until very recently Egyptians didn’t make horror movies. The countries in the middle east, with the exception of Turkey for some reason, tend to not really open themselves up to that kind of film making. So it’s not that they are haram, they just didn’t see that as an option. Whereas in Indonesia, there are loads and loads of these Jinn possession movies that celebrate Islamic values but use these demonic Jinn as a way to get at those themes. So based on our internet research, we decided that horror movies, in fact, are halal.
R: With Under the Shadow I was surprised and happy that it really takes on a female character who is having problems. Because of her political protest in the past she doesn’t get to go to medical school. And she gets arrested by the police while running away from the Jinn for not wearing any head covering. I think this is a pretty direct commentary on how there is horror and then there is the kind of scariness you live with in your life.
K: Of course.
R: Let’s talk about Jinn. From what I read they are not devils, they are not angels, but that Muslim theology says that God made them and they exist and they can be kindly, or they can be devilish.
K: Correct. They are another level of being that has intelligence that is human-like but they are not human. They are distinguished from humans in the Koran. They were often named alongside angels but they are clearly differentiated from angels.
They are a source of a lot of anxiety. Some parents use them to scare Muslim kids to be good. They are threatened and also warned about Jinn who pose a danger even to upright, virtuous kids.
R: Is it portrayed in the culture that you might see one sometime, or is it more like a ghost that is invisible?
K: Yes. They are mostly invisible. Sometimes there are certain people that can see them. Often they possess somebody and that is how they manifest and that is how they become visible.
R: Do you think there might be a Halaloween II?
K: Son of Halaloween!? I don’t know. There has been a lot of positive response to it. I think we would like to do it if there is interest. I don’t know of any other series like this. And it is an interesting challenge to curate a series of horror movies from the Muslim world that the people in the U.S. would actually want to see and would find interesting. I wouldn’t mind continuing if there seems to be interest in seeing another go-round. It has been very well attended and I am very happy about that, so I hope that it will be.
About Rich Dishman – My fascination with horror began with a way inappropriately aged viewing of the Universal Frankenstein. It was an experience so terrifying yet so exhilarating that I have spent the rest of my movie going life trying to top it. I began writing movie reviews for Classic-Horror.com in 2010. Since its retirement in 2012, I have been a regular contributor at the multi-media British site, Contains Moderate Peril, and more recently for the horror website Ravenous Monster. I have a day job, but I am also a professional musician (well, drummer). I want to start a project to perform a repertoire consisting exclusively of soundtrack music from horror and sci-fi films. Is that weird? I live with my wonderful wife and two cats. They see and they know that I “wouldn’t even harm a fly”. Rich Dishman has previously written for Horror Homeroom on Val Lewton and Oz Perkins.
