Twenty First Century Horror Films by Douglas Keesey

Author:Douglas Keesey [Keesey, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843449065
Publisher: Oldcastle Books
Published: 2017-03-02T05:00:00+00:00

IRAN

Under the Shadow (2016)

Director: Babak Anvari

Cast: Narges Rashidi (Shideh), Bobby Naderi (Iraj), Avin Manshadi (Dorsa)

Shideh is a young wife, mother and medical student living in 1980s Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War. The movie begins with a university administrator informing her that, due to her past political activism, she will no longer be allowed to continue her studies to become a doctor. And this is just the first of many patriarchal forces arrayed against her, forces which gradually seem so pervasive and overwhelming that they take on an almost supernatural power.

Her husband Iraj, himself a doctor, tells her that the forced end to her studies may be ‘for the best’ because now she can devote herself solely to domestic duties. Then, even after he has left to be a medic on the war’s front lines, she receives strange phone calls from him, filled with crackling static, where he berates her for being a bad mother. It is as though his constant criticism of her has become a ghostly voice in her head, undermining her belief in herself. The authoritarian male voices from loudspeakers, the blaring of the air-raid sirens, and the phallic missile that strikes the roof of her building all invade Shideh’s world to the point where she begins to succumb to paranoid madness, imagining that a djinn – an evil spirit that rides the wind – has intruded upon her home and peace of mind, threatening her safety and sanity. When Shideh flees her apartment in terror, clutching her six-year-old daughter, Dorsa, in her arms, military police do not offer to help her. Instead, they arrest her for not wearing the hijab or veil required by religious law, reminding her that she could be whipped for so ‘shamelessly exposing’ herself. Shideh is eventually freed and returns home, but the trauma of such religious intolerance affects her so strongly that its oppression now seems ubiquitous and inescapable. She imagines a hijab-wearing demon lady who wants to possess and smother Dorsa, for Shideh fears she will not be able to save her own child from a life of sexist restrictions.

When Shideh starts to see patriarchal oppression as a demonic power, this may seem like a terrible mistake born of uncontrollable fear and increasing despair at her own helplessness. But, in fact, viewing social forces as supernatural ultimately serves as a way to get a handle on them, symbolically localising them so they can appear manageable. As Shideh battles a ghostly, floating hijab to rescue her daughter from its suffocating confines, she gives all the oppressive forces around her a shape she can struggle with, an imaginary form she can fight. When there seems to be no realistic way to prevent her daughter from being possessed by a restrictive religious regime, Shideh can hallucinate an evil djinn who steals Dorsa’s doll so that Shideh can rescue it, patch it up and give it back to her daughter, symbolically saving her child from the regime’s grasp. By seeing amorphous social forces embodied as

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