a halal horror flick?

Yesterday Sepoy of Chapati Mystery linked to this site for a new Turkish film called "D@bbe" and asked me what it was about, and the answer is too good not to post here too--I'll just cut and paste my response from his comments section:

Wow. It appears to be a Turkified mash-up of The Ring, 28 Days Later, and all those religious-shlock horror films based on overliteral readings of Revelations….except here the quasi-theological basis is a verse from thr Qur’an (Surat an-Nami, the Ant, which says “And when the Word is fulfilled against them (the unjust), we shall produce from the earth a beast to (face) them: He will speak to them, for that mankind did not believe with assurance in Our Signs,” acc. to one online text). I can’t get the trailer to play, but the description on the film site says the premise is (paraphrased) that late at night, you’re alone, and get an email from a friend, with a picture attached–and when you look at it, you’re infected with some sort of electromagentically-transmitted virus/demon (the dabbe/beast), and doomsday (kiyamet) is on its way….one of the newspaper articles/reviews linked to on the site calls it “the first Islamic horror movie.”

I have no idea what mainstream interpretations of that verse are, but here’s a great signs-of-the-apocalypse webpage (based on the writings of some Turkish dude calling himself Harun Yahya) that asks, is television the dabbe?

Damn, I totally want to see this now. Turkish pop cinema is really branching out genre-wise. A big hit when I was there last summer was a sci-fi flick whose poster made me laugh for totally unintended reasons: the film was called G.O.R.A.*

*contextual note for non-chapati audience: gora is hindi/urdu for "white guy" (fem = gori) often with a mildly pejorative or snarky tone.