Djinn-Horror in Contemporary Turkish Cinema

Transcript

Let’s explore the post-millennial emergence of djinn-themed horror movies in popular Turkish cinema.

In the project I have recently completed for the British Academy, I studied these films, their significance in contemporary Turkish media culture, as well as their belonging to a more international revival of 'folk horror' in contemporary cinema.

Although most of these horror movies have been considered as trashy, cheap, productions which shouldn’t be taken seriously, they got more and more visible, and popular – both at the Turkish box office, and in their digital 'long tail' of global distribution on over-the-top streaming platforms including Amazon Prime, Youtube, and Netflix.

Today, I will focus on the local aspects: these films’ engagement with national political context, their style and narrative, and their reception by particular demographic groups.

Investing in the figure of the djinn, which originates from Anatolian folklore, Turkic shamanism and Islamic mythology, these films tell paranormal stories of witchcraft, black magic, demonic possession and exorcism. Different from other spectral beings, djinns ‘occupy a special, liminal status’ in Islam: they are of the earth, yet unseen on it. Various Quranic verses state that they ‘have free will and among them are both those who have submitted to God and those who are evil [Surah Al-Jinn 72:11–15].

However, in Turkish horror cinema particularly, the djinns are represented as beings with evil criminal intent, that antagonise marriages and families. They are often provoked by those who ‘'summon’' them to commit evil acts. These films show the intense rituals of Black magic (büyü in Turkish), summoning djinns to work for ‘'ill-willed’' humans. In Islam, the Quran acknowledges the existence of djinns; yet, contacting them and performing black magic is associated with ‘'worshiping the Devil’'. Black magic, and interaction with the djinn, is seen as a haram act, or a sinful transgression.

What interested me with regard to these djinn-themed horror films, was precisely their investment in the paranormal phenomena in the Islamic veneer, which are common/folk knowledge, part of what we may call 'lived religion' or 'popular Islam' in this case, yet always marginalised in the highly regulated notion of the official, 'state-endorsed', Sunni Islam in Turkey.

These types of stories about black magic contradict the official Sunni Muslim orthodoxy, so they contradict not only the legacy of modern secular republicanism but also the new status quo – that is the current president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s 'New Turkey' shaped by neoliberal Islam and an ethos of 'pious citizenship' defined through the 'good', 'conscientious' Muslim family values and morals.

My study proposed three areas of focus for the analysis of these films. Turkish sociopolitical context, film form, style, and narrative, and reception of these films by particular demographic groups.

First, sociocultural context. The reproductive family has a constitutive role in the history of Turkish politics across the secular republican and Islamic governance, yet its ideological construction shifted with the president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rise to power in 2002. The political theorist Ece Oztan notes that 'family is an important metaphor and an operational ground for [Erdogan’s] neoliberal conservative hegemony’ (Öztan 2014: 179).

Inevitably, this moral idealisation of family-centred cultural politics created a societal anxiety. Investing in families-in-crisis, intoxicated/cursed by the djinns which are called up by the vengeful members of the family (to curse other members of the same kin), the horror films’ affective engagement with horror is, I argue, shaped by the anxiety contemporary Turkish politics trigger through its instrumentalisation of family and family values across the secular vs. Muslim divides. You see similar spectacles of families-in-crises in other contemporary genre formations in mainstream Turkish media, such as Turkish soap operas and women’s daytime reality TV shows. And interestingly, the motifs in each genre when expressing the horrific incidents happening in a family resonates with one another: most horror movies use the excessive styles of Turkish soap operas and the women’s reality TV.

The second component of my analysis was on style and narrative. These films often follow a narrative formula. They start with a ritual of black magic [büyü]. We are then invited to a (Turkish) family household, where paranormal incidents start to occur. Experiencing the extraordinary events, the family members first struggle to believe in djinns; yet, when they are finally convinced to ask for help from a hodja, hidden amulets (muska in Turkish) are discovered in their house, which are the indicators of the black magic targeting the family. The hodja undertakes rituals of breaking the curse to exorcise the house and the possessed family members from the djinn(s) that were summoned through the amulets.

The medium’s 'decoding' of the amulet also reveals the origins of the curse, which often leads the narrative to a village that one of the family members are originally from. The story is then followed by the journey back to where it all started. The journey to the 'creepy' villages in Turkish provinces provides the characters with a resolution. The person who practiced the black magic is revealed after the buried past secrets about these villages are discovered.

These nonurban locations (i.e. taşra) are used to amplify class antagonisms, between 'white' secular middle-class domesticity, and the forgotten/abandoned villages of provincial Turkey, which resonates with the dominant representations of provincial Anatolian villages (taşra) as sites of state manipulation, ethnic conflicts, heterodoxy, and corruption, not only in mainstream media but also in art-house filmmaking (e.g. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) and Emin Alper’s Burning Days (2022).

In addition to the expressive use of mise-en-scène, the rituals of black magic and the scenes with hodjas who discover and attempt to break the spell/curse in the haunted houses, operate as spectacles that connect these films with Turkish audiences through the familiar culturally specific iconography of amulets, rituals, and traditions.

Yet, these spectacles also authenticate these films as 'Turkish/Muslim horror' for international audiences including those who consume horror media that operate in similar fields of religion-folklore syncretism.

In most djinn-horror films, the spectacle undermines the narrative resolution. The revelation of the actual perpetrator (of black magic) takes place in the very final sequences of the film: the final resolution is presented in an overwhelmingly accelerated and dense set of sequences, which makes the diegetic closure absurd and almost irrelevant to the value of djinn-spectacle experienced throughout the film.

Therefore, I argue that djinn-horror cannot easily be reduced to a coherent ideological standpoint. Beyond the secular vs pious Muslim binary which is often used to characterise the political polarisation in Turkey, every party is suspect in these movies. The reactionary-vs.-progressive binary proposed by Robin Wood’s seminal study on American horror cinema is not applicable here either. And perhaps it is the ideological ambivalence that makes them more powerful.

And finally, who watches these films in Turkey?

As part of this project, I had the chance to interview a number of filmmakers, producers, art directors, cinematographers, and make-up artists, affiliated with Turkish horror productions. I’ve asked them to reflect on their practice and to locate this emerging genre within the national cinema sector and the socio-political context.

One of the most surprising findings was that all interviewees were aware of which demographic groups they are making these films for. Relying on the box office stats, they mention the exact same demographics. The districts which almost all my interviewees had mentioned are where the working class and the aspirational lower middle-class communities live (with the majority being the pious conservative Muslim families). I have checked the voting behaviour in these regions and noticed that all the districts mentioned by the filmmakers are swing states.

In the 2014 general elections, the electorate voted overwhelmingly for Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party. However, in the latest mayoral elections and the general election, Erdogan’s party has lost most of their seats in these councils to the republican opposition.

What does this electoral loss say to us? Is Erdogan’s familial politics of raising 'a new pious generation of devout Muslims' losing its currency among the population? Perhaps, for the sake of an optimistic conclusion, I see the Muslim youth raised in conservative Muslim households (where I was brought up in 80s and 90s) have a more pragmatic relationship with politics and religion. If much of the horror spectatorship occurs in these areas where there is a clear discontent with the status quo of neoliberal Islam, then these younger audiences have at least the resilience to confront the toxic relations of power, property and family, and be entertained by their representations through horror media. Djinn movies, and their audiences, reveal the societal drive to move on from this seriously divided 'New Turkey' and to imagine a citizenship going beyond the superficial secular vs. pious binary.

Dr Cüneyt Çakırlar is Associate Professor in Film and Visual Culture. He teaches on a variety of modules in film and media studies.

This talk is part of the series The British Academy 10-Minute Talks, where the world’s leading professors explain the latest thinking in the humanities and social sciences in just 10 minutes.