Kneeling before a chalk star outside his tumbledown house, an old man performs a ritual to rid himself of evil spirits — which many superstitious Turks believe exist.
Perched behind the camera, director Metin Kuru tries to encourage the actor to convey the sheer agony of being possessed by a genie.
But there won’t be many takes, because Kuru needs to finish his film fast to feed Turkey’s voracious appetite for low-budget horror flicks, with a new supernatural chiller released every week.
“At the end of the day, I try to produce films with as few technical issues as possible,” Kuru told AFP between scenes of “Muhr-u Musallat 2 — Yasak Dugun” (“Sealed Invasion 2 — Forbidden Wedding”).
Filming many of the scenes in the dark helps.
“The colour palette of horror movies is not as varied, which allows filmmakers to shoot with cheaper cameras, less light and smaller crews,” Kuru said.
This year alone, 60 new homegrown horror movies will hit screens in Turkey, where demand for entertainment has not waned despite — or maybe because of — the economic crises gripping the country.
Few horror films were made until the 1990s, their growth coinciding with the rise of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamic-rooted AKP party.
– Superstitions –
Its coming to power in 2002 after decades of more secular governments helped let the genie out of the bottle, with more religious Turks — and plenty of secular ones — lapping up superstitious tales that were previously frowned on.
Film critic Gizem Simsek Kaya believes there may be a link between the horror boom and broader social shifts in Turkey.
“The drive to brush aside superstition and come closer to science (of modern Turkey’s founders) began to regress in the late 1990s,” Kaya said.
Religious-themed horror movies became popular with “Buyu” (“The Spell”) in 2004, and reached an even bigger audience with the launch of the big-budget “Dabbe” series in 2006.
Director Hasan Karacadag made six “Dabbe” films, the last in 2015, breaking Turkish box office records.
Other blockbusters followed from the equally popular “Siccin” franchise from director Alper Mestci.
“Some Islamic tendencies and the rising tide of conservatism play a role in this,” Kaya said.
– False idols –
Turkish horror films mostly revolve around jinns or genies — potentially mischievous spirits that are a part of Islamic myths and theology.
This can be tricky for makeup artists like Yesim Vatansever.
Not only are genies supposed to be invisible, but there are also more than 70 types, making depicting them a challenge.
“It would be much easier to visualise, say, an alien,” Vatansever said.
Film critic Kaya, who teaches at Istanbul’s Kultur University, said vampire movies do not work in Turkey because of religious sensitivities.
The idea of the living dead “in Islam is equal to committing shirk,” or the sin of idolatry, she said.
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