Not kidding: there's a Muslim horror movie festival... "Halaloween"

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Like all the good movies in its genre, Halaloween, the Muslim horror film festival, is back with a sequel — and this year, it’s free to stream online.

The film festival, hosted by the Global Islamic Studies Center at the University of Michigan, got its start in 2019 when the university’s chair of Middle East studies, Karla Mallette, then-director of the GISC, wondered if the horror genre even existed in the Muslim world. Are filmmakers in predominantly Muslim countries making horror films? What do Muslims even think about horror films?

As it turns out, the genre does exist, and its films are as varied as the cultures that produce them, according to Aliyah Khan, who now directs the GISC.

There are Turkish slasher movies and Iranian vampire films. There are movies about jinn possession from Indonesia and Malaysia and movies dealing with the supernatural from Morocco.

There aren’t many zombie movies — although festival organizers found one from Malaysia this year — perhaps because American zombie films grow out of perceptions of Vodou, said Khan, and ideas about “the living dead and the undead don’t strike Muslims as particularly Muslim or Islamic.”

“It’s really interesting just to think about what each part of the world thinks is important or thinks qualifies as horror,” she said.

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