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1) ARABIAN NIGHTS FANTASIES

The earliest Arabic-language fantasy features are a pair of Arabian Nights adaptations by director-producer Tugu Mizrahi, a key figure who had opened the first talkie studios in Egypt, and who was instrumental in securing a regional monopoly for Egyptian cinema. While his A THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS (1941) and ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES (1942) are filled with Middle Eastern flavor, their production was somewhat ironically inspired primarily by the huge local box office success of films like the Eddie Cantor vehicle ALI BABA GOES TO TOWN (1937) and the Korda production THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1940).

ALF LAYLA WA-LAYLA
A THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS (1941 Egypt, dir. Tugu Mizrahi)

As in so many of his films, Mizrahi turns a low budget to his advantage, deploying stylized paintings to represent key locations or taking his cameras out into the Sahara to capture some authentic landscapes. The freeing of a genie represents the key fantastic thrust of the movie, with this being's flight across the night sky also providing an occasion for one of the few pieces of anachronistic dialogue inserted into the film, and a stark reminder that the World War had arrived on Egyptian shores only months earlier: "You aren't a genie - you're a Zeppelin!"





ALI BABA WAL-ARBAIN HARAMI
ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES (1942 Egypt, dir. Tugu Mizrahi)

Featuring less fantastic content than its predecessor, the film is nevertheless of note for being the first to contain the magic words 'Iftah ya simsim!' ('Open sesame!') in their native tongue. It's also of note that, in a movie of otherwise realist sets dominated by many stylized archways, the scenes of the magic doorway are filmed consciously as fantasy, theatrical almost to the level of Méliès.




AMIRAT UL-GAZIRA
THE PRINCESS OF THE ISLAND (1948 Egypt, dir. Hasan Ramzi)

The closest thing to a movie with bona fide 'horror' sequences among the early Arabian Nights fantasies, this is in fact a prequel of sorts to Ramzi's SOLOMON'S RING (1947), discussed in the 'Genie movies' section below, with Sana Samih reprising his role as the genie unleashed from the Ring of Solomon, discovered this time around in a haunted cave.





ANTAR FI BILAD IR-RUMAN
ANTAR IN THE LAND OF THE ROMANS (1974 Lebanon/Turkey, dir. Samir ul-Ghusayni and Orhon M. Ariburnu)

Of the various color Arabian Nights-influenced fantasies produced in the Middle East during the 1960s and 1970s, this Lebanese-Turkish sexploitation epic stands out on account of its dazzling psychedelic sets and costumes, which transform every scene into an eye-popping spectacle.





MARUF UL-ISKAFY
SCHEHERAZADE'S LAST NIGHT (1987 Syria/Tajikistan, dir. Tahir Sabirov and Wadi Yusif)

The most effects-laden of the Arabic-language Arabian Nights fantasies, the actors in this one are mere chaff in the Harryhausen-inspired wind. Unfortunately, the absence of any stars with international clout really held back this visually enticing Syrian-Tajikistani epic, which would not be seen at cinemas in the region's main marketplace, Egypt, until a brief theatrical run in 1992.

3) THE INVISIBILITY FLICKS OF DIRECTOR NIAZI MUSTAFA

Prolific Egyptian director Niazi Mustafa (1911-1986) had studied John P. Fulton's special effects in Universal's INVISIBLE MAN series, and brought out his own string of invisibility movies during the 1940s and 1950s. The first, TAQIYAT UL-IKHFA (The Vanishing Cap, 1944), was sufficiently successful to generate a sequel, AUDAT TAQIYAT IL-IKHFA (Return of the Vanishing Cap, 1946). Unfortunately both movies have long been out of circulation; however, the director's 1959 remake of the material, THE SECRET OF THE VANISHING CAP, remains readily available. I've positioned this section immediately after the 'genie movies' above, because in all three 'Vanishing Cap' features, Mustafa presents invisibility as the combined product of scientific and mystical forces, the latter usually taking the form of a genie.

SIRR TAQIYAT IL-IKHFA
THE SECRET OF THE VANISHING CAP (1959 Egypt, dir. Niazi Mustafa)
Available with English subtitles on region-free NTSC dvd as 'The Secret of the Vanishing Cap'.

A unique combination of events - a father with his own laboratory, an elder son attempting to commit suicide under the same roof, and a younger son wearing a prayer-cap and making mischief in the laboratoy - causes a genie to appear, and an invisibility powder to be created. The 'vanishing cap' of the title is, in fact, a slight misnomer - it only causes invisibility due to being sprinkled with the powder that was created, and needs to be regularly dusted with the substance in order to maintain its powers. A cavalcade of Fulton-inspired effects follow, with the annoyingly cutesy younger son becoming that greatest of all horrors, a child who can be heard but not seen.






MIN AYNA LAK HAZA?
WHERE DID YOU GET THIS? (1952 Egypt, dir. Niazi Mustafa)

Mustafa's more straightforwardly sci-fi-based invisibility movie is one of the films, also including ISMAIL AND ABDEL MEET FRANKENSTEIN, which Universal decried as outright rip-offs of its productions; the charge is hard to deny, with several cues from Universal's INVISIBLE MAN series even featuring on the soundtrack of WHERE DID YOU GET THIS? The film charts the experiments of scientist Ahmad Magdi as he succeeds in making first a goldfish, and then a dog, invisible. He suffers a comic-relief setback with Ismail Yassin, on whom the effect is more 'regressive' in nature, only to find success in his subsequent human-based experiments, with the film ultimately playing out like a kind of 'best moments' compilation from Universal's INVISIBLE MAN features.






HABIB HAYATY
LOVE OF MY LIFE (1958 Egypt, dir. Niazi Mustafa)

Such was director Mustafa's fondness for Fulton's effects that he even worked an invisibility-style sequence into one of his romantic musical vehicles starring popular singer Sabah. The sequence depicts a criminal gang shutting the movie's heroes inside a room containing a corpse that seems to have a wandering soul, making lamps rise up and lighting cigarettes in mid-air. Needless to say, the pay-off reveals all to be a Scooby Doo-style set-up.

5) MUHAMMAD SHABL, EGYPT'S HORROR AUTEUR

The only concerted effort by a single director to establish an oeuvre of horror movies in Egyptian cinema can be attributed to Muhammad Fuad Shabl (1949-1996), the son of a former Egyptian consul to Japan, who fed much of his earnings as a disc-jockey, film critic and documentary filmmaker into financing a series of four horror features between 1981 and 1992. Shabl was truly a 'monster kid', as childhood friend Maha as-Samaduni recalled in 2008: "throughout his teens, he had a great admiration for the Prince of Darkness, i.e. Dracula movies (and Blacula, and any film with a title ending in -ula!). These movies scared me to death and throughout our teens Muhammad found great joy to scare me with Dracula, Frankenstein and the like. For instance, Muhammad had a horror mask that I hated. Evidently this increased his craving to wear it while talking to me."

ANYAB
FANGS (1981 Egypt, dir. Muhammad Shabl)

Shabl's monster kid tastes were present for all to see in his ambitious first feature, FANGS, a remake of THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) with the twist that Brad and Janet (or rather, Ali and Muna) don't encounter Dr. Frank-N-Furter, but rather... Dracula himself!

The film is filled with in-jokes and references to the vampire movies that had influenced Shabl, and features singer Ahmad Adawiya - who was phenomenally popular at the time - in the role of Dracula. But this wasn't enough to save the movie, which had been financed in part through the sale of land belonging to Shabl's family. FANGS met with hostile reviews berating its 'in-your face depiction of shrouds and blood', and the film flopped terribly at the box office, only gaining a minor cult following in recent years after some of its musical numbers were excerpted on television music stations.






AT-TAWIZA
THE TALISMAN (1987 Egypt, dir. Muhammad Shabl)

It took several years for Shabl to recover from the abject failure of FANGS (1981), which had perhaps simply been 'too much too soon' for Egyptian audiences. By the middle of the decade, and thanks largely to the home video boom, horror had been popularized somewhat among young urban audiences, with a series of Egyptian supernatural horror movies (discussed in the section below) being produced. Shabl was able to find funding for his next horror project more easily during this period, and THE TALISMAN further benefited from being left almost completely unscathed by the censor who had seemingly grown more accommodating to horror in the interim.

THE TALISMAN is probably Shabl's greatest achievement. Although he referred to it as being inspired by THE EVIL DEAD (1981), that inspiration really extends only to the extensive use of Raimi-esque traveling shots along floors and corridors, representing the journeys of evil forces  from a Satan-worshipping neighbor's house into the hitherto tranquil home of an innocent family. With its scenes of the Satan worshipper ripping off his own face, of fireballs traveling slowly through the family's home, and of a horned devil butting its way through a wall, the movie was surely the most extreme of the Egyptian supernatural horrors released at the time; more importantly, however, it found an audience, and in the coming years, Shabl was able to indulge his love of the genre with two further features.





KABUS
NIGHTMARE (1989 Egypt, dir. Muhammad Shabl)

Featuring none of the extreme visuals which characterized THE TALISMAN (1987), NIGHTMARE pits that movie's female lead, Yusra, against a seemingly unstoppable supernatural foe - a man who brutally attacks her in her dreams, and whose image resides in the files of the local police, identifying him as a deceased murderer. Inspired by the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series, the film takes that source material and varies it in such a way as to imbue its plot with considerable originality; its favoring of subtler visuals also helped it to reach a wider audience still than Shabl's earlier works.





GHARAM WA-INTIQAM... BIS-SATUR
LOVE AND REVENGE... WITH A MEAT CLEAVER (1992 Egypt, dir. Muhammad Shabl)

The director's final work prior to his early death to chronic liver disease was this gleefully ghoulish horror comedy, which imparted the following straightforward moral: if you smother your wife to death with a bowl of porridge and bury her remains in a shallow grave, purely in order to start a new life with your mistress - then don't be too surprised if your wife returns and is more than a little angry about the situation! Like Shabl's two previous features, the film was released theatrically before also becoming a minor hit on home video.

7) SATAN'S BIKERS

The very existence of the biker genre in Arabic-language popular cinema is a good indication of how strongly Hollywood movies influenced local production. Even though there really weren't any biker gangs to speak of in the Middle East, American-made biker movies enjoyed sufficient box-office success in the region during the late 1960s and the 1970s that filmmakers started turning out home-grown features about (non-existent) Arab biker gangs anyway. One smash hit was the Lebanese movie AL-JAIZA UL-KUBRA (The Big Prize, 1975), charting the exploits of an all-wrestler gang of bikers as they traversed dusty Levantine highways. However, the biker picture which really managed to gain an enduring cult following is WHERE DO YOU HIDE THE SUN? (1977), which in and of itself gives cause for the inclusion of a 'Satanic biker' section within this overview.

AYNA TUKHABIUN ASH-SHAMS
WHERE DO YOU HIDE THE SUN? (1977 Libya, dir. Abdullah il-Misbahi)

Libya never fostered any kind of film industry during the Twentieth Century, and it almost beggars belief that one of the tiny handful of features produced in the nation should be an action movie about narcotics-peddling, Satan-worshipping bikers. Helmed by an imported Moroccan director and an all-star Egyptian cast including a shaven-headed Adil Adham doing his finest Sid Haig impersonation, the movie is nominally a cautionary tale, earnestly described on Wikipedia as a 'film that addresses the effects of corruption on young people with the solution being adhering to social values'.

In reality, this is a 'cautionary tale' chiefly in a Dwain Esper sense of the term; the movie spends most of its running time relishing, and showing in close detail, the very things that it purports to condemn, and it's purely on account of its violent and horror-styled excesses that the film has developed a cult following. The opening credits, accompanied by a catchy theme tune with electric guitar accompaniment, also seem to be born from someone's LSD trip, depicting in swift succession everything from Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, via cavemen bearing clubs and Pharaohs designing palaces, to modern-day petroleum workers and a lone figure waving a Libyan flag, the only moment in the entire movie when its Libyan origins are acknowledged.




AL-AGENDA UL-HAMRA
THE RED NOTEBOOK (2000 Egypt, dir. Ali Ragab)

In recognition of the following which WHERE DO YOU HIDE THE SUN? (1977) has gained since its release, the baddies in this Egyptian thriller are styled, by way of an homage, as members of a similarly unlikely Satan-worshipping, narcotics-peddling biker cult, who light pyres in the shape of pentagrams and conduct their sinister machinations in underground cave networks... while toking up on reefers at regular intervals. Just like the biker gang in the 1977 movie, however, the ability of these drug-happy cultists to unleash death and destruction should not be underestimated, even within an otherwise reasonably lighthearted film such as this one.

9A) PSYCHOTRONIC GORILLAS, PSYCHOTRONIC CHIMPS

Like every other film-producing nation on Earth, it seems, Egypt also turned out a swathe of Tarzan-inspired jungle adventures, in which the image of Africa had little to do with the realities of life in the southern part of the (same) continent, and everything to do with emulating a commercially successful notion of exotic adventure born on a Hollywood soundstage. For all those who love a gorilla suit as much as I do, some of the hirsute props in these movies possess an irresistible fascination, though.

NADUGA
NADOUGA (1944 Egypt, dir. Husayn Fawzi)

Saddled with a title that can't help but sound like a knock-off of NABONGA (1944), Naduga is in fact the name of the ersatz Tarzan in this movie; an Egyptian governor's daughter lost in the jungle as a child, originally named Nadia, but referred to by local tribespeople as Naduga. Her protector in the jungle is an eight-foot-tall simian sporting one of the strangest (and most immobile) gorilla/ape-monster/you-tell-me-what-it-is suits ever witnessed on the silver screen.




BAYT UL-ASHBAH
THE HAUNTED HOUSE (1951 Egypt, dir. Fatin Abd il-Wahab)
Available with English subtitles on region-free PAL dvd as 'The Haunted House'.

Another Abbott and Costello-style vehicle for comedian Ismail Yassin, THE HAUNTED HOUSE offers a peculiar-but-enjoyable combination of African jungle adventure and heirs-turning-up-for-the-reading-of-a-will thriller, enlivened by the presence of such horrors as a headless ghost and a fellow who defies gravity by standing on the ceiling. The gorilla in this one looks entirely like a chimpanzee to me, but manages to cause all the usual old-dark-house gorilla mischief nonetheless.




ISMAIL YASS TARZAN
ISMAIL YASSINE AS TARZAN (1958 Egypt, dir. Niazi Mustafa)
Available with English subtitles on region-free NTSC dvd as 'Ismail Yassin Tarzan'.

I've always felt that this particular Ismail Yassin comedy suffers from a couple of major problems, one of which pushes it into unintentionally perverse territory. While the jungle exploration scenes certainly fulfil expectations by being packed with nerve-jangling adventure and copious stock footage, when we finally catch up with Yassin's Tarzan... he simply isn't very Tarzan-like. Even worse, the characters of Cheeta and Jane have been combined into a single female-chimpanzee character who - after she and Tarzan are taken to the big city - grows jealous of Tarzan's new female acquaintances, thus giving rise to fairly unpalatable questions about precisely what man and beast got up to in the jungle. As Tarzan movies go, this is consequently one of the oddest.




WASIYYAT RAGUL MAGNUN
TESTAMENT OF A MADMAN (1987 Egypt, dir. Ahmad Tharwat)

This belated heirs-gathering-for-the-reading-of-a-will horror comedy is a thoroughly fun romp, even though it frequently feels like a picture produced about forty years out of its time. Indeed, with an Abbott and Costello-inspired routine packed in for good measure during one of the gorilla scenes ("Go - go - go - "; "Heck, I don't want to go!"), the only signs that this is a 1980s production at all come from elements such as the axe-wielding slasher who is on the loose in the old dark house, and the presence of a kung fu maniac modeled vaguely on Rocky from THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975).

10) SCIENCE FICTION

As the presence of UFOs in the above-mentioned MY BELOVED UNCLE ZIZOU makes clear, Arabic-language fantasy cinema occasionally incorporated a handful of sci-fi elements into a movie. Full-blown sci-fi productions were less common, not least because such works generally demanded a fairly high effects budget and a certain amount of know-how in the execution of these effects. The four rather accomplished works below are therefore all the more surprising, in view of the fact that they effectively constitute experimental products of a cinema with no tradition of making such films.

RIHLA ILA AL-QAMR
JOURNEY TO THE MOON (1959 Egypt, dir. Hamada Abd il-Wahab)
Available with English subtitles on region-free NTSC dvd as 'A Trip to the Moon'.

This well-shot production ambitiously attempts to encompass any number of themes familiar from 1950s Hollywood sci-fi movies: the mechanics of space travel; exploration of an alien landscape; a robot; a lost civilization of Amazon-like women in short skirts; and a dying race of horribly scarred mutants created through exposure to a nuclear attack. For the most part, the film is successful as well, and entirely worthy of the 'classic status' accorded to it in recent years, being let down only by some repetitive comic relief involving Ismail Yassin as he gets drunk aboard the rocket.






AL-MILYUNAYR UL-MUZAYYIF
THE COUNTERFEIT MILLIONAIRE (1968 Egypt, dir. Hasan us-Sayfi)

This wacky sci-fi comedy stars one of the decade's most celebrated performers, Fuad ul-Muhandis, as a car mechanic-turned-inventor whose previous creations, including the N-2900 Supercar, have proved singular failures. His hopes are now pinned on the success of his domestic robot, played in a wonderfully clunky costume by Hasan Mustafa, whose all-too-human face leers out through the robot's headpiece throughout.





ADAM WAN-NISA
ADAM AND WOMEN (1971 Egypt, dir. As-Sayid Bidayr)

In the wake of an atomic disaster, the entire male population of the Earth has been rendered sterile, except for a young man named Adam who was deep below the planet's surface in an iron mine at the time of the accident. This hapless nonentity suddenly finds himself feted as humanity's savior, exhibited to international teams of scientists, and instructed to leave his wife and instead join his new harem of beauty contest winners; until, that is, the fateful day when other males start to regain their potency and Adam is no longer 'special'. This satirical sci-fi movie is of interest not merely for its candid approach to sex and sexuality, but also because it's an unauthorized adaptation of Pat Frank's 1946 novel 'Mr. Adam'.





AL-ALAM SANAT 2000
THE WORLD IN THE YEAR 2000 (1976 Syria, dir. Ahmad Fuad)

The lone sci-fi feature to come out of Syria, THE WORLD IN THE YEAR 2000 may sound like a futuristic fantasy, but is in fact a variant on THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957). Furnished with an intelligently written script, the machinations of its 'mad scientist' actually make a reasonable amount of sense; he's attempting to downsize human beings before the Earth becomes overpopulated in coming decades. The special effects, sadly, leave more than a little to be desired, and 1976 was a late date for a black-and-white production even by local standards; however, apparently no technicians were available who had the know-how to attempt these effects in color at all. Nevertheless, the film remains a tantalizing curio from a nation whose movies have seldom been seen overseas.

12) ...AND A SELECTION OF MISCELLANEOUS FANTASIES

This final section draws together a number of other supernatural fantasies that don't easily fit into any of the subgenres discussed above. I've collected them together in this way in the hope of highlighting once more the sheer breadth of overlooked fantasy material that exists in the realm of Arabic-language cinema.

IFRITAT ISMAIL YASS
ISMAIL YASSINE AND THE GHOST (1954 Egypt, dir. Hasan us-Sayfi)
Available with English subtitles on region-free NTSC dvd as 'Ismail Yassin's Phantom'.

A fascinating failure, this ghost comedy starring the ubiquitous Ismail Yassin makes the mistake of presenting its key scenes of a psycho murdering a young woman as a brutal act made to feel all the more brooding thanks to stylish noir-influenced camerawork and lighting. With Yassin furthermore appearing genuinely traumatized when first approached by the woman's ghost, the comic mood can never take hold convincingly. Indeed, the conclusion finds matters as earnest as they ever get in an Ismail Yassin movie, as he also finds himself in noirish peril after being cornered by the psycho, whose eyes gleam as wildly as the blade in his hands.



ARUS UN-NIL
BRIDE OF THE NILE (1964 Egypt, dir. Fatin Abd il-Wahab)
Available with English subtitles on region-free NTSC dvd as 'Bride of the Nile'.

In view of the global reputation of Ancient Egyptian culture and antiquities, it's perhaps surprising that such subject matter has seldom been represented in Egyptian fantasy flicks. One prominent exception is this beautifully photographed tragicomedy about an ancient princess whose spirit is unleashed in the present day by excavation work at an archaeological site. Eventually the pharaohs of old find a way to call her back to her time (via the television set!), leaving her newfound love the possessor of the only 'Dear John' letter to have been penned in hieroglyphics for millennia.






MAMNU FI LAYLAT ID-DUKHLA
FORBIDDEN ON THE WEDDING NIGHT (1976 Egypt, dir. Hasan us-Sayfi)
Available with English subtitles on region-free PAL dvd as 'Forbidden on the Wedding Night'.

Ever wonder what's worse than being nagged by your new mother-in-law on your wedding day? Being nagged by your dead mother-in-law's ghost on your wedding night, that's what. This sex comedy variant on Endora's reprimands of Darrin in BEWITCHED teeters amusingly on the brink of bad taste throughout - even the title was enough to drive some critics to apoplexy when the movie first came out - and features a standout scene involving a nutty soothsayer and his attempts to return 'mother' to her place of eternal rest.




KHATIAT MALAK
SIN OF AN ANGEL (1979 Egypt, dir. Yahi ul-Ilmi)

This vexing piece of 1970s psychedelia manages to make Heaven look like the interior of a starship, where vaguely STAR TREK-inspired viewing screens and uniforms, as well as choreographed dance routines, are all the rage. With the head angel outraged after viewing a compilation of scenes of (remarkably innocent-looking) human excess on Earth, blue-eyed Husayn Fahmi - frequently cast as something of an otherworldly enigma in Egyptian movies - gets to observe humanity at first hand, becoming embroiled in organized crime and murder but nevertheless concluding that humankind (not to mention fallen angels like himself) are still worthy of redemption.




RISALA ILA AL-WALI
MESSAGE FOR THE GOVERNOR (1998 Egypt, dir. Nadir Galal)

Arguably the last significant fantasy production of the period under discussion here, from 1940 to 2000, this big-budget vehicle for superstar comedian-turned-serious-actor Adil Imam is a time-travel epic with a bittersweet satirical bite. In it, Imam plays a messenger in the army of nineteenth-century governor Muhammad Ali, who is charged with carrying a vital communiqué from the battlefront. After narrowly escaping death, he takes a shortcut through a network of caves where he encounters a supernatural entity. Upon exiting the caves, he finds himself transported to modern-day Cairo, with all his friends dead, incomprehensible new technologies all around him, and only a wax dummy of Muhammad Ali in a museum to whom he can deliver his message. Among urban audiences in particular, the film found huge resonance with its reactionary Y2K-era sense of uncertainty about the prospect of stepping forth and finding one's footing in a new, even faster-moving, more technology-driven age.





As I said way back at the beginning, the above overview - as lengthy as it is! - is by no means comprehensive; indeed, in focussing on fantasy films, the vast panoply of psycho horrors and serial killer thrillers has fallen almost entirely by the wayside, to cite just one example. However, I hope that the sheer scale and diversity of the outline above are indicative of just HOW MUCH worthwhile and interesting Arabic-language genre material has remained overlooked for far too long. Certainly the act of assembling this thread has helped me to bring some order to my hitherto all-too-disparate thoughts about these films, and if anyone has any questions, thoughts, corrections or follow-ups to any of this, then I'll do my best to respond.

Otherwise, a huge thank you to anyone who has actually read down this far, or at least skimmed through the pictures!!