Now showing in Pak: Horror film starring ‘burqaman’

Forget Freddy Krueger and Norman Bates — here comes the “Burqaman”. The first serious Pakistani horror flick for a quarter of a century features a psychopath dressed in a blood-soaked version of the traditional garb of Islamic women. Hordes of zombies, including a dwarf, add to the gore in the self-financed Zibahkhana, or Hell’s Ground, which premiered in Islamabad last weekend.

“There is nothing political or anti-religious about the murderer wearing a burqa,” says first-time director Omar Ali Khan, who also owns a chain of ice-cream parlours. “I visualised the murderer as a burqaman because of my childhood fear of burqas. The image of a woman shrouded in such a cloth would remind me of a ghost,” he said .

“For me, it was a dehumanising outfit.” The low-budget effort belongs to a new generation of Pakistani movies that defy the traditions of the increasingly moribund Lahore-based film industry. It has already been screened at the NatFilm festival in Denmark and the Philadelphia Film Festival, and will also feature at the New York Asian film festival later this year.