Contemporary Iranian Horror Cinema

This Element explores how twenty-first-century Iranian filmmakers have applied elements from Persian culture to the horror genre. Although horror films have not often been a part of the rich Iranian cinematic tradition due in part to censorship laws following the 1979 revolution, I argue that a small group of directors has made provocative use of the genre. The first section draws on theories of monstrosity to examine the re-contextualisation of pre-revolutionary film tropes in the work of ...