October continues with Day 25 of The Kasturi/Files here at Speculative Chic! Less than a week left in our crazy horror movie breakdown via discussion, occasional arguments, book recommendations, and of course the perennial cocktail. From the weird minds of Sandra Kasturi and Gemma Files!
Sandra: We head back to the Middle East for today’s movie, Under the Shadow (2016, written and directed by Babak Anvari), set in Tehran in the 1980s at the height of the Iran-Iraq war. The title of the movie itself has multiple meanings and resonances: under the shadow of war, of fear, of a repressive regime, but also the trials of marriage, the restrictions of family life and parenthood, and the grip of thwarted ambition. And finally, under the shadow of supernatural forces.
Gemma: As the movie begins, our protagonist — former medical student Shideh (Narges Rashidi) — is already in more than enough daily danger without supernatural elements being added to the mix: it’s 1988, and as a female citizen of post-revolutionary Iran, she can’t even walk the streets alone without having to cover up most of her body or being subject to random checks by pretty much any man in uniform she passes. A university official has just gotten through telling her that because of her youthful involvement with various leftist groups, she will never be allowed to complete her studies, but should consider herself lucky nonetheless; there’s a war going on with Iraq, and if it wasn’t for the fact that she’s married to a doctor and has a child already, she’d probably be in jail. We can see the struggle on Shideh’s face as she wills herself not to protest, to simply accept this verdict as gracefully as possible, then go home and throw out (most of) her medical texts before finally shucking her chador at last and sweating her way through an illegal copy of Jane Fonda’s Workout Tape with the curtains shut, so the neighbors won’t inform on her.
Sandra: Rashidi is a wonderful actress — watching all those different emotions play over her face as she (the character) tries to control herself is so worth watching and it establishes the tense tone of the film in a subtle way, right from the get-go. (Well, if the wart-torn setting didn’t already do that for you.)
Gemma: It’s a brilliant way to set up tension long before anything particularly apolitically creepy starts to happen. As a modern woman at the mercy of the state, Shideh essentially lives two lives at once — the private life she shares with her husband and her daughter, Dorsa (Avin Manshadi), versus the chador-clad public life which sees her reduced to a bare sketch of close-wrapped femininity, essentially indistinguishable from any other Iranian female. She can’t speak freely, or act freely, just bite down on her own simmering resentment and hope she’ll eventually come to terms with it. Even Shideh’s relationship with Dorsa mainly consists of enforcing her own rules on the increasingly sad, fearful little girl, exercising what tiny bits of power she has over her in order to make sure Dorsa doesn’t also incur the state’s wrath, which all too often cuts the tenderer parts of maternal affection off at the root. Not to mention how, when Shideh tells her husband Iraj (Bobby Naderi) what happened at the university, all he has to say is: “Maybe it’s for the best.”
Sandra: It’s funny, you kind of think the husband’s being a dick, if it weren’t for the fact that he’s obviously frightened for his wife, and you get hints of the undercurrents in their marriage that suggest there’s more going on here than just Shideh’s resentment at being figuratively shackled, and Iraj’s supposed male complacency since his life isn’t the one being restricted. But as they talk about Shideh’s feelings about not being able to continue studying medicine — she blames her husband because he wanted her to stay home and look after their daughter — Iraj reminds her that she could in fact have returned to school once the universities re-opened after the cultural revolution was over, and could have finished her studies then. He also throws in her face the fact that she had sneered at him for putting his education first, and not being politically active, like she had been. There’s an implication that she had considered him cowardly for not doing so at the time. Now Shideh’s paying the price for that decision, and to make matters worse, her husband did become a doctor, and she has to live with that fact, right in her face, every single day. Iraj doesn’t know how to quit when he’s ahead and snaps at Shideh that becoming a doctor wasn’t her big dream as she claims, but her mother’s. Ouch. Nothing worse than someone throwing a hidden truth in your face. And that’s how marriages go wrong: that death of a thousand cuts, flaying our reason from us over the course of years. The comedian Christian Finnegan once said that marital arguments don’t ever end, they just go into remission. Truth. And you can tell that Shideh and Iraj have been on this lather-rinse-repeat cycle for a long time.
Gemma: Things certainly don’t get any better after Iraj is drafted and sent to the front, reduced to a nagging voice at the end of a static-laden phone line. Dorsa starts having night terrors and sleepwalking, the same way Shideh did when she was her age, while Shideh becomes even more mired in her own depression and diffidence. As rumor and suspicion mount and the city empties of people, Shideh and Dorsa remain, living an increasingly nocturnal, claustrophobic parody of “normal” life, in between using the basement as a makeshift air raid shelter. It barely seems worth the effort of moving out of their downtown building and going to stay with her in-laws in the countryside, not even when (as in Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone) an unexploded bomb hits the building and simply lodges there; for lack of any better plan but sheer stubbornness, Shideh just puts crosses of tape up over the windows to keep them from collapsing during the next blast, and keeps on keeping on.
Naturally enough, this is when things start to get really weird. As the apartment building’s remaining residents thin out, an orphan child living with the landlord whispers to Dorsa that he believes he’s seen a djinn — not a ghost but an evil spirit, a portent of further doom haunting a place already rendered “bad” by this war that seems as if it’ll go on forever. The landlord’s wife claims she doesn’t believe in djinn per se, but tells Shideh what she’s heard anyhow: “They travel on the wind, moving from place to place, until they find someone to possess.” Djinn are most active “where there is fear and anxiety,” according to banned Iranian writer Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi, whose book Shideh reads while looking for answers… and that’s Shideh’s Tehran, in a nutshell. Just external pressure juxtaposed with internal pressure, equalized into a shaky balance which could be thrown off by anything new, good or bad.
Sandra: I love the idea that the djinn arrived on the back of a missile, borne by the wind, drawn to the particular fear and anxiety in Shideh’s building. The djinn themselves when you finally get to see them seem explosive — shadowy beings using bedclothes and chadors — to give them shape as they burst into the scene and vanish just as quickly. Beings of air and darkness.
Gemma: Though Shideh tells Dorsa repeatedly there is no such thing as a djinn, over time, she begins to doubt her own words — how else could Dorsa’s beloved doll Kimia vanish, or Shideh’s Jane Fonda tape tend up in the garbage for everyone to see? How else could Shideh’s medical textbook, locked in a cabinet, somehow end up in another apartment? By the time Shideh finally decides to take her to Iraj’s parents, Dorsa has developed a fever and refuses to leave until her doll is found. She keeps trying to break into the upper part of the building where the bomb had lodged, sure that since Kimia went missing after it fell, she must still be up there somewhere. Meanwhile, Shideh has also begun to have nightmares which escalate to a horrific waking vision of a floating chador that moves like a ghost, popping up out of nowhere in the apartment hallway and scaring Shideh so much she runs off down the street with Dorsa in her arms, only stopping when local police arrest her for having forgotten to put on her chador. More upset with her lack of modesty than anything else, they threaten her with a whipping or having Dorsa taken away, then deliver her right back where she started.
“That’s the climate right now,” one neighbor consoles her. “Don’t let that change you.” But how could it not?
Sandra: The man in charge at the police station tells Shideh that “now we have standards,” as if pre-revolution Iran was a hotbed of sin and indulgence. Well, sure, what with all those unsupervised women running around, causing chaos.
In addition to the basic tension of the film, waiting for everyone to be bombed into oblivion or for someone to get arrested and tortured by the police, one of my favorite things is how the djinn are fucking with the tenants of the building, particularly Shideh and her daughter — by moving familiar items, sowing fear and dissension. There’s a super-creepy moment when Shideh wakes up to find her husband Iraj miraculously in her bed, his back to her. Or . . . is it him? When she realizes it’s not, she says in terror, “This isn’t real!” and the djinn answers, “Why not?” And then rears up over her under the sheets . . . it’s horrifying. The grotesque intimacy of it reminds me of those awful scenes in Ju-on (The Grudge), when that dead boy is in the bed making that horrible sound. The contradiction between what humans want and what supernatural beings want is always a great builder of tension. And the realization that we don’t matter in the least to something that has terrible powers, except perhaps as a plaything, or something to feed off, is awful. Why not, indeed?
The Unexploded Missle
Gemma: It’s pretty easy to settle into a reading of Under the Shadow in which Shideh’s djinn is just a psychological construct, her own way of dealing with the dystopia she lives in by translating it into something she can fight first-hand and win against, something she can potentially banish from her life (and Dorsa’s). And that interpretation makes even more sense when you realize that increasingly, the messages the djinn sends — through Dorsa, or a voice on the phone that might or might not be Iraj’s — are all about Shideh’s shortcomings as a woman and a mother, how selfish she is, how diffident, how unable to rise to the occasion. But why can’t we have it both ways? A city under siege is chock-full of anxiety and fear, after all; to a djinn, it’d be like a smorgasbord, a not-so-movable feast. And one way or the other, Anvari keeps on cranking up the tension, priming us for a climactic explosion of some sort — maybe literal, maybe not. This isn’t a situation that’s going to get solved in two hours after all. Hell, it’s not even solved today.
Sandra: I tend to frown on the psychological “it’s all in her head” explanation, and will always choose the supernatural one, since that’s so much more interesting to me. However, you’re right! Why can’t it be both? War makes people crazy, and, well, maybe there are supernatural entities that are drawn to that. The unexploded missile in Under the Shadow has punched a hole right through the roof of the apartment building. It’s like a hole has been punched in their world — literal and figurative. But that’s exactly what war does, as does the supernatural — tears your life apart from its foundations. Can you rebuild? Maybe. Or maybe you do as Shideh and Dorsa do — get the hell out of there and don’t look back. You don’t win. You just survive.
Cocktail: I Dream of Jeannie Martini
Sandra: Well, this is a bit irreverent and does not go with the movie at all thematically except that they both involve djinn. Sort of. But I loved the name and couldn’t help myself! And it sounds pretty tasty.
Ingredients:
- 1 ½ ounces Malibu (or any coconut-flavored Rum)
- 1 ounce Lemon-flavored Vodka (or regular vodka, with a splash of lemon juice)
- 1 ounce Cointreau
- 1 ½ ounces Cranberry Juice
- ½ ounce Lime Juice
- Lemon Twist (garnish)
Directions:
Shake all the liquid ingredients vigorously with ice. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Twist the lemon peel over the drink and drop it in.
Book Recommendations
Sandra: I loved Declare by Tim Powers. It’s simply one of the cleverest books I’ve ever read — taking real-life events (the defection of notorious British spy Kim Philby and other historical events in that time period) and giving them a supernatural explanation: djinn. Powers has said that his main rule for the book was that he could not fabricate any actual historical events or twist them to his own purpose — he had to stick to known facts. The interpretation of them, however, and anything else that might have gone on that wasn’t on the record — well, that was fair game. It’s a fascinating look at the time period (just from an historical perspective), but also a wonderful and wonderfully strange dark fantasy novel.
I haven’t read this one yet, but I want to: Djinn City by Saad Z. Hossain.
I did enjoy the Weather Warden series by Rachel Caine, which is an Americanized take on what djinn are, and perhaps a little more in the romantic fantasy genre than I usually like, but they’re quite fun and make for a good weekend read when you’re slurping your martinis on a cold autumn night. Book one is Ill Wind, so you can start there.
And really, you could go to the original 1001 Arabian Nights (but get a good translation — and there is a fascinating sub-Reddit on this). Worth doing just so you get the non-Disney version of djinn/genies.
Gemma: Pretty much the only rec I can think of is Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, which isn’t horror per se, but is definitely horrific — an account of growing up during this same period. The movie she made from it is great too, if you prefer your graphic novels animated.
Sandra Kasturi is the publisher of ChiZine Publications, winner of the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and HWA Specialty Press Awards. She is the co-founder of the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium and the Executive Director of the Chiaroscuro Reading Series, and a frequent guest speaker, workshop leader, and panelist at genre conventions. Sandra is also an award-winning poet and writer, with work appearing in various venues, including Amazing Stories, Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales, Prairie Fire, several Tesseracts anthologies, Evolve, Chilling Tales, ARC Magazine, Taddle Creek, Abyss & Apex, Stamps, Vamps & Tramps, and 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin. She recently won the Sunburst Award for her short story, “The Beautiful Gears of Dying,” in the anthology The Sum of Us. Her two poetry collections are: The Animal Bridegroom (with an introduction by Neil Gaiman) and Come Late to the Love of Birds. Sandra is currently working on another poetry collection, Snake Handling for Beginners, a story collection, Mrs. Kong & Other Monsters, and a novel, Wrongness: A False Memoir. She is fond of red lipstick, gin & tonics, and Idris Elba.
Formerly a film critic, journalist, screenwriter and teacher, Gemma Files has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She has published two collections of short work, two chap-books of speculative poetry, a Weird Western trilogy, a story-cycle and a stand-alone novel (Experimental Film, which won the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst award for Best Adult Novel). Most are available from ChiZine Publications. She has two new story collections from Trepidatio (Spectral Evidence and Drawn Up From Deep Places), one upcoming from Cemetery Dance (Dark Is Better), and a new poetry collection from Aqueduct Press (Invocabulary).
I absolutely adored Ill Wind when I read it. And then, as I was wont to do back in the day, I bought the rest of the series to read later. MUCH LATER. And when I tried to get back into it, I found my enjoyment had diminishing returns. :-/ But I think that’s a result of me waiting SO LONG to get back to the series.