Between Premodern Terror and Western Excess: Egyptian National Anxiety and 1980s Popular Horror (Copy)

In the contemporary Arab world, Egyptian cinema retains its status as the penultimate center of cultural production. Though Egyptian cinema has received marginal attention from Western critical and popular audiences, the resonance of Egyptian popular culture throughout the Middle East cannot be denied. However, as more attention and resources have increasingly been devoted in Western academia towards Egyptian cinema, certain niches of Egyptian film production remain wholly unexplored. In the 1980s, at a time when Egypt transitioned full throttle into the economic privatization programs that began during President Sadat’s reign, a slew of horror films appeared that highlighted the anxieties surrounding an eroding Egyptian national identity and consciousness. In films such as Al-Ens Wal Jinn (The Humans and the Jinn) and Al-Ta’widhah (The Talisman), as in most postcolonial Egyptian cinema, the quest of defining “national identity” became a key thematic undercurrent and recurrent tension. Acknowledging the hitherto ignored horror subgenre of 80s Egyptian popular cinema reveals the fundamental contradictions of the Egyptian modern nationalist project: namely, defining Arab nationalisms as “modern” (against “backwards” premodern traditions) without succumbing to the overwhelming influx of Western capital associated with the 1980s Egyptian economy.

Throughout the 20th century, the development of film industries throughout the Middle East coincided ideologically with the politics of a burgeoning anti-colonial national consciousness, with Egypt occupying center-stage as the paragon of Pan-Arab culture and politics. Despite cinema’s relationship with industrial Western colonialism, Arab filmmakers quickly realized that they can wield the cinematic apparatus to write back against Western imperialism (Shafik, Arab Cinema 7). In most Arab nation-states, openly anti-colonial cinema became the most popular genre of filmmaking after national liberation movements achieved independence, for their ability to “recognize the latent possibilities of the medium to support and express national self-assertion and liberation” (Shafik, Arab Cinema 18). Egypt, however, remained exceptional to most other Arab nation-states: Egyptian cinema began in earnest as early as during the colonial period under British tutelage (Shafik, Arab Cinema 17). However, the Free Officers coup of 1952 that brought President Gamal Abdel-Nasser into power to end British influence invigorated the political possibilities of Egyptian cinema. Foregrounding the promise of socialist Pan-Arabism, Egyptian cinema during the Nasser era found popular audiences throughout the Arab world (Shafik, Popular Egyptian Cinema 4-5).

However, by the 1980s, the Pan-Arab and socialist aspirations of the Nasser era gave way to economic privatization through the neoliberal agendas of Presidents Sadat and Mubarak. The 1967 June War with Israel particularly caused mass disillusionment with Nasser’s promises of Pan-Arab unity throughout the Arab world, spelling the beginning of the end for a socialist political program in Egypt (Shafik, Arab Cinema 37). After Nasser’s death in 1970, his successor Anwar Sadat took Egypt into a markedly different political and economic program. Sadat’s “Open Door” economic policy moved away from Nasser’s programs of nationalizing state industries to allow for greater privatization and the infiltration of Western capital (Shafik, Arab Cinema 143). Furthermore, Sadat also reversed Nasser’s hardline of rejecting normalization with the Israeli state, participating in the 1978 Camp David accords. Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, who came into power in 1981 until he was toppled in the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, followed Sadat’s neoliberal economic policies in earnest. As such, the 1970s and 1980s spelled the beginning of heightened economic reliance on Western markets, a far-cry from the anti-colonial promise of the Nasser era.

In the turbulent economic and political context of the 1980s, a curious subgenre of Egyptian popular cinema received a revival: horror films blossomed as a negotiation between popular “realism” and “melodrama” film genres. Although horror had existed as a genre in Egyptian cinema during the colonial period, its resurgence in the 1980s corresponds with new political and aesthetic currents of New Egyptian Realism. Back in the 1940s, Egyptian horror more closely resembled “melodramatic” Egyptian cinema, which closely adhered to Hollywood production codes and often became associated with “bourgeois” entertainment (Shafik, Popular Egyptian Cinema 248). However, after the Free Officers coup in 1952 and the rise of Nasser, Arab filmmakers became increasingly disdainful towards the genre of melodrama, opting instead to create realist films as “ideological markers for those who considered themselves enlightened, leftist-progressive and with a heart for the national cause” (Shafik, Popular Egyptian Cinema 249). Furthermore, in the aftermath of the Nasser era and the rise of Sadat, a new generation of realist filmmakers took Sadat’s Open Door economic policy to task. As Viola Shafik argues, “The realism of the 1980s has discovered new enemies. Instead of the old landowners, it is unscrupulous businessmen, corrupt nouveaux riches, and thieves that have made it good” (Shafik, Arab Cinema 143). In the context of the ideological commitments of 1980s new realist cinema, Egyptian horror movies emerged to compromise the popularity and commercialism of melodramatic Egyptian cinema with the politics of realist filmmaking. This time, however, they were informed by the context of a growing neo-bourgeoisie and greater Western influence into Egypt.

However, even as horror returned, it remained shackled by key confines that tethered it ideologically to state ideologies of respectability, which critiqued the state only at an implicit level. By the 1980s, Egyptian horror cinema had to navigate extremely stringent censorship laws: Viola Shafik paraphrases the Egyptian censorship law of 1976 as the following:

“Heresy and magic should not be positively portrayed. Immoral actions and vices are not to be justified and must be punished. Images of naked human bodies or the inordinate emphasis on individual erotic parts, the representation of sexually arousing scenes, and scenes of alcohol consumption and drug use are not allowed. Also prohibited is the use of obscene and indecent speech. The sanctity of marriage, family values, and one's parents must be respected. Beside the prohibition on the excessive use of horror and violence, or inciting their imitation, it is forbidden to represent social problems as hopeless, to upset the mind, or to divide religions, classes, and national unity. In general, criticism of Islam is not allowed, this being the official state religion in most Arab countries. By extension, a positive representation of atheism is not appropriate.” (Shafik, Arab Cinema 34)

Operating within these ideological confines, Egyptian horror filmmakers could not transgress too far beyond the boundaries of respectability placed upon commercial realist and melodramatic cinema. As such, even as these films present politically and culturally sensitive representations, the ideological boundaries of censorship laws did not permit them the ability to make overt critiques of the nation-state, its cultural politics, and its leadership by presenting “social problems as hopeless” or questioning “national unity.”

Despite the poor production quality, tame representations, and implicit politics of Egyptian horror cinema in the 1980s resulting in their dismissal by Western and local critics alike, their representations carry important consequences due to the scale of their exportation and distribution throughout the Arab world. The distribution of Egyptian cinema retained a central paradox: poor distribution networks excluded the Egyptian countryside altogether, allowing distribution companies to overcompensate by focusing on exporting their films throughout the rest of the Arab world (Shafik, Popular Egyptian Cinema 5). As a result, Egyptian cinema particularly stood out among Arab cinematic traditions not only because of its longevity, but for its commercial value. Pan-Arab audiences tuned in to watch Egyptian films, even as the films were brushed aside by Western and local critics alike for their weak production value (Shafik, Popular Egyptian Cinema 2). One of the very few Western academics to take on Egyptian cinema as a serious topic of study, Viola Shafik, herself admits that she struggled to contend with popular Arab media in her capacity as a curator in Europe because of its relative obscurity and poor production value (Shafik, Popular Egyptian Cinema 2). Ironically, in spite of the minimal serious academic inquiries into Egyptian popular cinema (much less the miniscule Egyptian horror subgenre), these films enjoyed an immense popularity throughout the Arab world among viewers that cut across religious, class, and ethnic lines.

The most popular Egyptian horror film of the 1980s, Al-Ens Wal Jinn (The Humans and the Jinn) (1985), narrativizes the failure of bourgeois aspirations of Westernization associated with the 1980s throughout the Arab World. The film follows Fatma, played by famed Egyptian actress Yousra, who returns from the United States having completed her medical degree, only to find herself haunted by a Jinn named Galal, played by equally famous actor Adil Emam. Initially, Galal and Yousra appear to be peers in medical circles in the United States. Both are dressed in the latest fashion, following bourgeois codes of respectability. However, as Fatma begins to deepen her relationship with a doctor she works with in hopes of marriage, Galal confesses his deep love for her and reveals himself to be a Jinn. To reveal his identity as an occult being, Galal takes Fatma to a disco-themed birthday party, a clear sign of Western excess. At the party, Galal’s mother tells Fatma that Galal has known her for a very long time, evoking an important flashback: Fatma’s ex-lover, who died heartbroken in a car accident after she decided to leave Egypt to study medicine in the US just as they were getting ready to get married. As a consequence of Fatma’s “betrayal” of her boyfriend and her homeland alike, a Jinn returns to haunt Fatma right before she can get married and settle down as a well-to-do doctor abroad. 

However, Westernization and class aspirations are not solely to blame for the terror inflicted upon Fatma—pre-modern Islamic traditions themselves become a key source of abjection and fear, resolved through the technological and ideological tools of modern science and modernist religion. When Fatma’s coworker and her doctor do not believe her Jinn story, Fatma resorts to allowing her mother to inquire about a Muslim shaikh who can perform an exorcism to rid her of Galal. However, Fatma immediately places the shaikh’s legitimacy into doubt—she finds him to be not a shaikh (religiously legitimate Muslim scholar) but a musha’with, or a sorcerer. As animal skulls and other objects signifying pre-modern knowledge adorn his room, the musha’with demands that Fatma obey his every command if she wishes to rid herself of the Jinn, whom the musha’with identifies as a particularly troublesome womanizer Jinn. As Fatma attempts to carry out the musha’with’s demands, she cries out loud to her mother, “My mind refuses to believe in anything this man has told me to do!” After she dances with the sorcerers in a scene that exaggerates their otherness, Fatma rejects the musha’with’s knowledge as myth and superstition (khurafat wa taqalid). As a result, Fatma falls deeply ill and lies down in a hospital bed, where a doctor and a legitimate shaikh conclusively banish the Jinn together from Fatma’s life.

Al-Ens Wal Jinn resolves the tensions of Egyptian national identity in the post-Nasser neoliberal era by positing a middle ground between Western affluence and a modernist Islam assimilable with upper-class values, juxtaposed against irrational pre-modern traditional knowledge. To banish the supernatural creature haunting Fatma and keeping her from her aspirations of affluence, both the doctor and the shaikh work in tandem at the film’s conclusion. The doctor, representing biomedical knowledge much more widespread in Egypt by the 1980s, cures Fatma from the superstitious tradition employed by the sorcerer. Similarly, the shaikh, trained at a modernist religious institution compatible with the state (Al-Azhar), effaces the illegitimate sorcerer’s knowledge with a Godly-ordained authority. As a result, Fatma and her husband take a flight away from Egypt at the end of the film, with Galal the Jinn ultimately banished from her life. Fatma’s journey towards bourgeois success and Westernization ultimately succeeds, but only insofar as she is able to call upon the aid of the Janus-faced twin modes of modern Egyptian thought: Islam and secular knowledge. The antithesis, pre-modern occult sciences, have historically played a deeply central role among Egyptian (and most Arab) indigenous populations, signified by Fatma’s mother suggesting to visit the sorcerer in the first place (El-Bizri and Orthmann, 7-8). However, in the project of building a modern nation-state after the colonial encounter, national elites and Muslim scholars alike dismissed knowledge of the supernatural as superstition and hearsay (Lauziere, 40-43). Al Ens Wal Ginn ultimately provides salvation for the bourgeois couple through focusing on the legitimate knowledge of the modern Egyptian nation, sidelining “traditional” knowledge as a result. As such, Al Ens Wal Ginn renders itself textually connected to melodramatic Egyptian genres, where bourgeois characters ultimately succeed at bridging the gap between “tradition” and “individual happiness” (Shafik, 249).

However, if Al-Ens Wal Jinn ultimately absolves its bourgeois protagonists in a similar manner to melodramatic Egyptian cinema, Al-Ta’withah (The Talisman) (1987) aligns itself more closely with the politics of 80s new realist cinema by focusing on a lower-class family exploited by a powerful landlord magician. Al-Ta’withah follows an ensemble cast playing an oversized family entrapped together in the confines of a very small home inherited to them by a deceased father. The characters include Mahmood, the de-facto patriarch of the house, his wife Rawya, Mahmood and Rawya’s infant son, Mahmood’s mother, and Mahmood’s two sisters Faten and Nadia. When a rich landlord tries to convince them to sell their house to place them in a lofty apartment, Mahmood rejects the offer due to his father’s historic connection to his house (in spite of the poor condition of his overcrowded house). As a result, the landlord performs a series of spells on the family: a goat shoots out a laser from his horns, their furniture spontaneously burns, and a Jinn attempts to rape Mahmood’s wife. After a series of spells, the Jinn summoned by the landlord successfully possesses Mahmood’s sister Faten, who gets checked into the hospital. The film concludes when the Jinn haunts the entire hospital in an attempt to possess Mahmood’s wife—the Jinn and the landlord are both ultimately destroyed through the collective holy Qur’an recitations of various family members. By positing the plot’s central struggle as a lower-class family fighting their exploitative landlord, the Al-Ta’widhah renders its horror in politically oppositional terms towards the neoliberal economics of post-Nasser Egypt.

Additionally, Al-Ta’withah also more explicitly engages with the melancholia surrounding the post-Nasser era by pointing to the failures of the Camp David Accords and narrativizing the protection of “the home,” an allegory for the Egyptian nation. In the film’s early scenes, Mahmood teaches high school students about Saladdin, whom he calls a “Pan-Arab leader” who beat the “Christian invaders.” After this history lesson, the film cuts to 5 minutes of footage from the Egyptian film Saladdin the Victorious (1963), a film Viola Shafik notes as being a particularly salient allegory for Nasserist Pan-Arabism and a secular Arab Muslim-Christian coalitional struggle against Israeli settler-colonialism (Shafik, 43). The film’s insistence on recalling Saladdin and Nasser is particularly pointed given the Camp David Accords, an Arab-Israeli peace treaty brokered by Anwar Sadat widely considered a betrayal of the Palestinian cause in Arab popular media (Shafik, 43). However, an unfortunate byproduct of the film’s critique of the Israeli state is its inclusion of anti-Semetic tropes: the landlord magician terrorizing the family wears a yamaka, reflecting the dissemination of Western anti-semitism into the Arab world after WWII that particularly damaged perceptions of indigenous Mizrahi Jews (Shafik, 33). Nevertheless, the film represents the infiltration of the neoliberal political-economics behind the Camp David Accords into the space of the home itself: Mahmood’s two sisters represent a binary between “Egyptian” and “Western.” Faten reads an Arab novel on her bedside next to hanging posters of Nasser and Umm Kulthum, while her sister Nadia’s bedside is adorned with posters of The Beatles and Michael Jackson as she listens to rock music and frequents the disco. Mahmood is ultimately charged with protecting his father’s historic home, symbolic for the nation as a whole, from the sorcery of the landlord, who threatens to steal the home.

Nevertheless, much like Al Ens Wal Ginn, The Talisman also plays on the “Otherness” of Islamic pre-modern knowledge to resolve its central anxieties about the modern Egyptian nation in the midst of Westernization. As the landlord’s spells intensify, various household members start to brainstorm methods of overcoming the Jinn. In a sequence that almost completely mirrors Al Ens Wal Ginn, the mother of the family entreats Mahmood’s wife Rawya to call upon the help of a shaikh, who also turns out to be a sorcerer. Rawya’s ecstatic dance with the sorcerers is much more intense, culminating in two dancers slaughtering a chicken over Rawya’s head. When Rawya returns, the landlord’s spells only intensify—and her husband Mahmood deeply disdains upon Rawya and his mother for calling upon the support of illegitimate, superstitious sorcerers. At multiple points throughout the rest of the film, Mahmood insists that “every issue has a scientific explanation.” Much like Al Ens Wal Ginn, pre-modern Islamic occult sciences are effaced for a combination of biomedicine and legitimate modernist Islam, as a combination of hospitalization and Qur’an recitation ultimately drives the Jinn away from possessed family members.

Egyptian horror cinema in the 1980s tasked itself with the impossible mission of defining the Egyptian and Arab nationalisms at a key historical juncture: the failure of Nasserist Pan-Arabism and the ascendance of Egypt’s new bourgeoisie as a result of the Sadat and Mubarak neoliberal economic reforms. Though The Talisman and Al Ens Wal Ginn differed on whether the nation’s bourgeoisie deserved salvation, both realist and melodramatic 80s horror films defined the Egyptian nation as decidedly modern. To destroy the haunting Jinn and devils and protect the nation, the protagonists must resort to a combination of biomedicine and modernist Islam, rather than fall prey to the pre-modern sorcerer’s illigitimate superstitions. As such, while critiquing the Westernization of Egyptian society during the neoliberal era, The Talisman and Al Ens Wal Ginn do not fall back on indigenous knowledge traditions that preceded the European colonial encounter. The censorship codes structuring the narrative and visual content of both films rendered them unquestionably allied with modernist state ideologies, despite the implicit critiques found in both films. Beyond the borders of Egypt, the films’ exportation throughout the Arab world only reinforced the hegemonies of Arab nationalisms: modernist and never at odds with “progress,” yet critical of the influx of Western capital and culture.

Works Cited

El-Bizri, Nader, and Orthmann, Eva. The Occult Sciences in Pre-Modern Islamic Cultures. Ergon Verlag, 2018.

Lauzière, Henri. The Making of Salafism Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century. Columbia University Press, 2015.

Shafik, Viola. Arab Cinema History and Cultural Identity. American University in Cairo Press, Oxford University Press, 1998.

Shafik, Viola. Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class, and Nation. The American University in Cairo Press, 2007.