Working Class Zombies and Men in Burqas: Temporality,Trauma,and the Specter of Nostalgia in Zibahkhana

Abstract

2007 saw the release of the film Zibahkhana (dir. Omar Ali Khan), an independent production billed as “Pakistan’s first extreme horror film.” Combining prominent nods to classic Hollywood horror films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Night of the Living Dead with plenty of references to Pakistani horror and action cinema, it foregrounds issues of social class, conflicting ideologies of Islam, globalization, and public sanitation. Featuring a vanload of privileged urban teenagers, a mob of zombie villagers, Pakistan’s own Dracula, and a deranged family of killers including a large male figure in a burqa, film is not a simplistic critique of current socio-political issues in Pakistan; rather this article seeks to understand how its narrative and visual elements create powerful, temporal, and moral ambiguities that resist such superficial interpretation. Through a variety of narrative and visual techniques, Zibahkhana rejects simple dichotomies (e.g., “Islamic radicalism versus kind and gentle Sufism”) and instead uses blurred temporalities, fleeting allegorical moments, and the invocation of a rather ominous nostalgia to offer a sophisticated critique of the relationship between cinema and the nation-state.