Be still my beating heart! No, really. I thought the intersection of Bollywood and hip hop were two great tastes, but now it looks like filmmakers in India and Pakistan are rushing to feed their audiences’ new taste for blood — specifically with slasher and zombie films, Bollywood style. The crowning undead gem of this new wave of horror is Zibahkhana (2007), screening as part of Bollyhorror: A Season of South Asian horror which runs August 17- 31 at the ICA, London. Check out the Zibahkhana website, and view the trailer embedded after the jump. *Death wears a burka*. Take a stab at this snip about the Bollyhorror genre from Guardian UK:
The undead are stalking Pakistan – and it’s all to feed eastern moviegoers’ huge appetite for horror. Sarfraz Manzoor reports on the genre where the killer wears a burka.
A group of teenagers, en route to attend a rock concert, lose their way when their car runs out of fuel in the dead of night. They find themselves in an unfamiliar rural backwater where they are confronted by flesh-eating zombies and a psychotic cannibalistic killer dressed in a sheet. It could be the plot to a thousand Hollywood horror films but while these teenagers may dress, talk and smoke dope like young Americans they are in fact young Pakistanis, and the film – Zibahkhana or Hell’s Ground – is the first modern horror film to be filmed in Pakistan.
Filmed in and around Islamabad, Zibahkhana manages to include Pakistani rock music, hijras – transvestite eunuchs common in the subcontinent – as well as some pointed social criticism of contemporary Pakistani society. And a serial killer dressed in a burqua. The film’s director, Omar Ali Khan, was born in London and spent his childhood watching Hitchcock and Hammer horror films. It pays homage to 1970s slasher classics such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and Friday the 13th while remaining a defiantly Pakistani picture.
Link.
* * * * * * *