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.
In the west, Pakistani and Indian cinema is usually associated with musicals, romantic comedies and revenge thrillers. Even British Asians, raised on mainstream Bollywood, may be surprised to learn that there is a tradition of South Asian horror which reaches back more than 60 years and which has attracted some of the most famous names in Indian cinema.
The emergence of VCRs had a major impact, as Hollywood horror films became increasingly accessible during the 1980s. Since Indian film-makers lacked the technical expertise to produce high quality special effects and make-up, audiences began slipping.
In the same way, Pakistani audiences were able to watch Bollywood films and the smaller Pakistani industry lost out in the comparison. The ‘doom boom’, as it was referred to, appeared to be dead.
But in horror nothing remains dead for long; the genre was revived with the release of Bhoot (2003), a stylish supernatural shocker directed by Ram Gopal Verma.
Hell’s Ground, moreover, is the product of a Pakistani film industry that, in contrast to thriving Bollywood, is in perilous health. Once it produced 120 films each year; these days that figure is closer to 40 and the growth of satellite television has further eroded its audience.
One consequence of this dismal state of affairs is that there are many experienced people who will happily work for next to nothing. It was this, coupled with the advances in digital camera technology and HD cameras, which convinced Omar Ali Khan it would be possible to direct his first feature film in Pakistan.
The horror tradition is less pronounced in Pakistani cinema but Khan’s new film is not the first from the country. “Back in 1967, when I was a young boy,” recalls the 45-year-old filmmaker, “I remember hearing about a film called Zinda Lash or (The Living Corpse) - I was too young to watch it but I remember adults talking about it and becoming rather obsessed by it”.
Zinda Lash was a black-and-white Pakistani retelling of the Dracula myth with added lashings of Jekyll and Hyde. Khan tracked down a tatty pirated video of the film; it spurred him to look for the original negative and push for it to be released onto DVD.
“The main star of the film was a guy called Rahan,” says Khan, “and he just had incredible screen presence. So when I started writing my film I was really keen to try and involve him, just so I could bring him back.”
Apart from Rahan, most of the cast of Zibahkhana are in their early 20s. The undoubted star of Zibahkhana is a psycho killer who favours dressing in the traditional Islamic burqua. Khan says the burqua killer is his homage to the masked killers from films such as Terror Train and Friday the 13th. “These days the burqua has become a very political item of clothing,” he says, “but for me the idea came partly from those 1980s films - but also from being five years old and seeing a woman dressed in a burqua for the first time. She reminded me of a ghost and the burqua to me seemed a dehumanising outfit.”
The Guardian