Forget Freddy Krueger and Norman Bates — here comes Burqa Man. The first serious Pakistani horror flick for a quarter of a century features a psychopath dressed in a blood-soaked version of the traditional garb of Islamic women.
Hordes of zombies, including an undead dwarf, add to the gore in the self-financed Zibahkhana (Hell’s Ground), which premiered in Islamabad last weekend.
“There is nothing specifically political or anti-religious about the murderer wearing a burqa,” says first-time director Omar Ali Khan, who also owns a chain of ice-cream parlours.
“I visualised the murderer as a ‘burqa man’ because of my childhood primal fear of burqas. The image of a woman shrouded in such a cloth would remind me of a ghost,” says the self-confessed film geek, adding: “To me, it was a dehumanising outfit.”
The low-budget effort belongs to a new generation of Pakistani movies that defy the traditions of the increasingly moribund Lahore-based film industry, known as Lollywood. It has already been screened at the NatFilm festival in Denmark and the Philadelphia Film Festival in the United States and will also feature at the New York Asian film festival later this year.
Khan says he was heavily influenced by his love of classic American horror films — especially 1970s and 1980s movies such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
The plot of Zibahkhana focuses on five Pakistani teenagers, including two girls, who travel to a rock concert after lying to their parents about where they are going. First their car runs out of fuel in the dead of night and they are attacked by people who were turned into zombies after drinking contaminated water. Then they are surrounded by a psychotic family of butchers.
“The film sticks more to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre genre,” says Khan. “It abides by the rules and morals of classical horror movies — teens misbehave, get nastily punished.” But he stresses that he also wanted a “strong Pakistani cultural background”.
The film is steeped in local colour — tea houses, Lollywood posters and even a pendant with the words “Allah is great” that protects one of the characters.
Social criticism
Khan says he has also inserted some covert social criticism. “The zombies being contaminated by polluted water highlights the huge gap between the rich, who drink Nestlé water and Perrier, and the poor, who are literally dropping dead due to a constant lack of drinkable water,” he says.
The film also alludes to such themes as young Westernised urbanites living in a developing nation; the feudal system that still underpins Pakistani politics; and underlying tensions between Muslims and Christians.
And then there is the burqa — the symbol of the repression of women under the ultra-Islamic Taliban regime that ruled Pakistan’s neighbour, Afghanistan, between 1996 and 2001.
Khan insists it was not meant to be topical, and only became so when hundreds of burqa-clad female students from Islamabad’s pro-Taliban Red Mosque took their anti-vice campaign to the streets two months ago.
“It seemed like we had made the film to exploit the situation. But this was purely by accident and this political resonance was not wanted, since we shot the film last summer, long before the Red Mosque issue,” he says.
The film was co-produced by British-based cult video label Mondo Macabro, but its low budget meant Khan needed the help of young theatre and movie talents from across the country.
He then faced problems when organising the premiere in Islamabad, where the only movie theatre was burned down by Islamic extremists several years ago and is yet to be rebuilt. He eventually settled for a posh city club.
Khan slammed the current state of cinemas in Pakistan, saying that today there are only 250 nationwide, a third of the number in the 1970s. “Today, cinemas are rat-infested. People don’t want to go to such places,” he says.
The established Pakistani movie industry has also been overwhelmed by Bollywood films on pirated DVDs and cable channels, despite a government ban on movies from India.
But the director, who is considering a follow-up to Zibahkhana, says the audience response to the screening made him more optimistic about the future of Pakistani cinema. “At least it sounds clear that the Pakistani public is longing to start going to the movies again,” he says. — AFP