On October 29th, 2019, Under The Shadow will be the last film to conclude our Muslim Horror Film Festival: Halaloween.

This film festival aims to explore a couple of questions: What scares Muslim audiences? How do horror movies conceived for a Muslim public transform the familiar tropes that Hollywood and Hammer horror taught us? How do Muslim directors of horror movies use the genre to ask probing questions about gender and family tensions, social injustice and political oppression, demographic change and social unrest? Are horror movies halal (permissible in Islamic law)? Why so many jinn - and where are the Muslim zombies?

Join us at 9:00 PM at the Michigan Theater on October 29th, and every Tuesday of October for a free screening of a Muslim horror film. All Screenings are free, open to the public, and will include English subtitles. Screenings are first come-first served. For more information on our festival, why we're running it, and the other films we are screening, please visit: ii.umich.edu/islamicstudies/news-events/events/films.html


Film Description:
October 29: Under the Shadow (dir. Babak Anvari; Iran, 2016): set in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war, this movie is celebrated as a meditation on the fallout of the Iranian Revolution from a feminine perspective. A woman and her daughter hunker down in their Tehran apartment during the Iraqi bombardment. Did the missile that struck their building bring a jinn into their lives? Jump scares, demonic kids, revolutionary misogyny, mother-daughter and husband-wife tension, and violence against furniture as a mom fights to save her child. In Persian with English subtitles.