‘In Flames’ Director Zarrar Kahn On Crafting Socio-Realist Horror In Pakistan
After premiering at Cannes and being selected as Pakistan’s official submission for Best International Film at the 2024 Oscars, In Flames opened in theaters early this year. With In Flames out now on VOD, Canadian-Pakistani filmmaker Zarrar Kahn wants you to watch his Urdu-language drama not just as horror but more of a “genre-bender”.
Set in present-day Karachi, In Flames follows sheltered teen Mariam (Ramesha Nawal) and her uptight mother Fariha (Bakhtawar Mazar) as they grieve the death of the family patriarch. There’s no time to shed any tears though as they are knee-deep in debt while parasitic relatives loom large. Meanwhile, Mariam catches feelings for American expat Asad (Omar Javaid) but this romance is short-lived. Matters only get worse when the men from Mariam’s life reappear as ghosts that only she can see.
In 2022, British writer-director Alex Garland proved that men can be the vilest beasts in horror (with the very on-the-nose title Men). With a relatively more grounded approach, Kahn similarly prioritizes real-world masculine threats over any supernatural elements. As he explains over a Zoom call, “When the horror does reveal itself, it’s not something out of this world but very much rooted in reality.”
Kahn, who was born in Karachi, represents his birthplace in all its bustling glory. A particularly sappy sequence even finds Mariam and her new beau journeying to some scenic outskirts, a sequence that concludes with a pitstop at a sea-facing hut.
At the same time, Kahn doesn’t shy away from exposing the misogynistic and conservative attitudes lurking in this modern metropolis. Unable to bear a woman driving a car, a particularly regressive bystander throws a brick at Mariam’s windshield. Apart from this obscenity-hurling brick-pelter, we get introduced to many other male characters who urge Mariam to stay within her limits. In another Orwellian scenario, Mariam and Asad are separated in a public park by a nosy stick-waving policeman who lectures the unmarried couple about public indecency.
Kahn elaborates on his inspirations by mentioning the Pakistani feminist initiative Girls at Dhabas (dhaba loosely translates to “roadside restaurant”). Launched in Karachi by writer-photographer Sadia Khatri in 2015, this multi-city movement champions the cause of female access and independence in public spaces.
“If you walk around in Karachi, you’re not going to see a lot of women,” Kahn says. “Based on the women I spoke to, this fear of going alone in public was stemming from a very active feeling of being watched and this really nefarious gaze. If they were alone in a public space, there was a specter that was looming over them, that was telling them that they were unsafe. And I think that kind of unlocked something. That was horror.”
While Kahn is the sole writer of his gritty screenplay (based on his own 2018 short Dia), the lens was always supposed to be a woman’s. This quest urged him to collaborate with a female cinematographer. With Pakistan currently not having any, he relied on Kazakhstani DOP Aigul Nurbulatova to capture the nauseating presence of the men around Mariam, both real and surreal.
“In Flames was never meant to titillate the audiences or be used as horror sexploitation.” Kahn continues. “The intention was to make our audience feel as uncomfortable and as suffocated as Mariam and Fariha do.” But any situation of graphic sexual violence for shock value was a strict no-no.
While Kahn continues to garner acclaim since the global premiere of his Canada-produced/Pakistan-set low-budget horror, the public response in Kahn’s country of birth remains “divisive”. With its social critiques and heavy subject matter, Kahn and his producer Anam Abbas couldn’t draw the attention of any distributors in Pakistan. “There aren’t many distributors in the first place.” Kahn jokes. So, Abbas and Kahn decided to rely on themselves for distribution.
As for gaining clearance from the country’s censor board, marketing In Flames as a horror came in handy this time.
“The genre elements helped us. Because they thought ‘Oh this is just another ghost story’. Thankfully, genre has been doing that since the dawn of genre. It packages and codes and allows you to say things that you can’t say otherwise.”
In Flames finally premiered in Pakistan with limited screenings in cities like Karachi and Lahore. Reactions among younger viewers were more supportive and encouraging but the middle-aged and older demographic had polarizing responses. With limited multiplexes, expensive tickets, and a still-developing cinema infrastructure, Kahn says that “people often go to watch movies for escapism” and not bleak socio-realist horrors.
While Kahn’s understandably upsetting brand of realistic horror feels new to Pakistan, the country has had a limited but colorful history with the genre. An interesting deep cut from 1967 is Zinda Lash (The Living Corpse), a low-budget vampire drama heavily inspired by the Hammer’s Dracula and released in the US under the title Dracula in Pakistan. Equally campy was 1994’s Sar Kata Insaan (Beheaded Man) which found an evil scientist stitching a policeman’s head onto a gangster’s headless body. Gory zombie thrillers or exorcism-driven dramas followed in the 21st century.
“I’m grateful these schlocky movies exist because they kept the industry going. But they weren’t my touchpoint for horror. I just wanted the horror in my movie to be an extension of the characters’ life experiences.”
Now, Pakistan isn’t a country that immediately comes to mind when we think of Asian horror. But then again, even its neighbor India, with Bollywood and other well-funded regional film industries, doesn’t boast many horror offerings of note in the face of the Japanese and Korean monopoly.
But much like In Flames, the times are changing and some of the best horrors from South Asia are the ones that are touching upon socio-political realities. Take for instance the Indian horrors Tumbbad (in the Hindi language) and Bramayugam (in Malayalam), both of which explored the oppression under British colonialism and India’s unequal caste system with elements drawn from Hindu mythology and folklore. Coming to Bangladesh, the 2022 Oscar-qualifying Bangla-language short Moshari (Mosquito Net) addressed human survival from a post-pandemic lens, with survivors shielding themselves from mutated mosquitos.
Even diaspora South Asians are merging their own culture’s traditions and ancestral history with modern-day immigrant realities. Bishal Dutta’s 2023 horror It Lives Inside explores an Indian-American teen’s struggles of fitting in with her peers while pitting her next with a pishaach (a flesh-eating demon from stories in the Indian state of West Bengal). While not a horror per se, the Riz Ahmed-starrer Mogul Mowgli found a British-Pakistani rapper haunted by nightmarish visions of the blood-soaked Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947.
In Flames joins this pantheon of contemporary South Asian horror, defying cultural stereotypes while also holding a mirror to its own society.
On the night of its Pakistan premiere, Fariha actress Bakhtawar Mazhar’s own brother walked out of the screening. A subsequently difficult conversation later, Mazhar’s sibling revealed how the film made him feel guilty about his own male privilege. Hopefully, In Flames will lead to similar self-introspection among other men, making way for more difficult conversations in patriarchal households. That’s definitely some progress for a film that its local distributors thought “had no market”.
In Flames is out now on digital and VOD.
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