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Talal Selhami Brings Morocco’s First Movie Monster To Life With “Achoura”

Monday, January 24, 2022 | Interviews

By WILLIAM J. WRIGHT

With much of the motion picture industry still centered in the United States and Canada, North American horror fans still tend to be largely insulated from overseas genre offerings. Of course, there are notable exceptions: The Italian horror boom of the 1980s that brought us the gory, technicolor spectacles of the legendary Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci and the rise of Asian horror in the ’90s and aughts that saw U.S. studios scrambling to cash in with remakes of such J-horror and Hong Kong hits like Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and the Pang Brothers’ The Eye come immediately to mind. In what can only be described as a boon for genre fans, the growing popularity of content-hungry streaming services like Netflix and Shudder and VOD has literally opened up a world of horror films that might otherwise have never been seen in the U.S. or Canada. From the shocking chills of the Thai ghost story Shutter to the campy, Stranger Things-style thrills of India’s Typewriter to the tense, psychological terrors of Sweden’s Knocking, horror fans have never had easier access to a larger variety of international genre fare. 

Yet, for a variety of sociological, religious, and political reasons, some regions of the world have been sadly underrepresented in the worldwide horror boom — specifically the largely Islamic nations of North Africa and the Middle East. Nevertheless, this often troubled part of the world may be on the cusp of bringing us the next great wave of original, innovative horror films. At the forefront of this burgeoning movement are such filmmakers as Iranian-American director Ana Lily Amirpour whose 2014 feature debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night breathed new life into the classic vampire trope and Babak Anvari, director of 2016’s Under the Shadow, a gripping tale of a mother and daughter facing a supernatural assault against the backdrop of war-torn 1980s Tehran.

Joining Amirpour and Anvari is Franco-Moroccan filmmaker Talal Selhami. Raised on a steady diet of ’80s-era American horror, Selhami channeled his genre obsession into his directorial debut with the 2006 short Sinistra. The story of a cartoonist who discovers the power of his dark side after breaking his arm, the success of Sinistra eventually led to Selhami’s leap to features with 2010’s Mirages, a horror-fantasy film about the survivors of a bus crash facing manifestations of their deepest fears in the Moroccan desert. Selhami’s latest feature ACHOURA is a frightening and emotionally-wrought tale of childhood friends who reunite as adults to take on an ancient evil from their past. Completed in 2015 and touted as “the first monster movie shot in Morocco,” ACHOURA had a wildly successful festival run in 2018 and 2019, earning a special jury prize at the prestigious Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival in Spain. The COVID-19 pandemic and a host of other problems prevented an earlier wide release of ACHOURA, but, thanks to distributor Dark Star Pictures, the film came to VOD and DVD in late 2021. 

Talal Selhami recently took time out of his busy schedule to speak to us from his home in Paris about ACHOURA, his lifelong love of movie monsters, and his upcoming projects.

Thanks for speaking with me today, Talal. Before we get into ACHOURA, tell me a little about your background as a filmmaker.

I was very lucky because I had the opportunity to make my first feature when I was like 26 or 27. That was Mirages, my very first feature. I did several shorts before, and the last one was quite a success. It was very, very, very low-budget. I shot it with my DVCAM and a very small group of people who helped me, but the movie did well. We went to many festivals starting with the Sitges Festival and then the Screamfest in Los Angeles and many more. I had this opportunity to travel with the movie, so I discovered a new way to make movies in a way. Everything is so related to meeting people, meeting the public. It was very, very exciting. I felt, “This will definitely be my job — I’m not done with wanting to be a director. Maybe I have a chance.”

Then, I had the opportunity to make Mirages, which was originally made for Moroccan TV. Moroccan TV ordered several movies. Mine was the last one to be shot, so I had the opportunity to see the other ones. They were very, very low-budget — 100,000 euros — very tiny. I got to see where the problems were in the other movies. Based on this, we decided to write a script which would be set only in the desert. There’s a very small introduction in the city, and the rest [of the movie] is in the desert — five people in the desert. This is how we built it, and it worked pretty well. 

Like with my last short, Mirages did well in festivals, mostly in European genre festivals. By this time, I met many friends who were like me, starting as filmmakers or festival runners. In these last 15 years, we grew up together. This is one of the many reasons I’m very attached to the fantasy and horror genre community. 

I had to battle to release Mirages in theaters, especially in Morocco. After that, when I was done with Mirages, I thought that I should open my own production company and try to raise local funds myself. This is what happened with ACHOURA. I started writing ACHOURA and raised some funds in Morocco, then we [raised some money] in France. ACHOURA was very low-budget. It was a very long quest! I’ve only done two features in ten years, but I’m lucky. Many people don’t get the opportunity to do one! I feel terribly lucky, and I love this job.

How did your interest in horror begin? What attracts you to the genre?

It started when I was very young. I grew up alone with my parents. I have a half-brother and a half-sister, but I didn’t have the opportunity to grow up with them, so I was the only kid in the house. My best companions were movies. Because my parents were very busy, they didn’t check on what I was watching! [Laughs] Many people of our generation grew up watching these fantasy-horror movies. One of my favorite shockers was A Nightmare on Elm Street. That one caused many nightmares! As I grew up, I opened myself to other kinds of cinema and other genres — drama and stuff. But horror was my first love. When I started making films, I absolutely had to start with horror because this is what I love. This is what gives me thrills. Making these moments for the audience and building these worlds that don’t exist is really exciting for me as a director.

Who are some of your influences as a horror director? What are some films that have inspired you?

As I mentioned, A Nightmare on Elm Street — Wes Craven’s work was very important to me. Like many directors of my generation, I discovered John Carpenter’s movies. I didn’t know too much about these directors other than their names when I was a teenager, but I felt there was a connection between all these movies because they were all, in a way, representative of a period — not only in the way they were made but sociologically. They all share something. I felt very close to this. As you may have noticed, these are all American movies. I was living mostly in Morocco, but I also lived in France when I was a kid. The ’80s was the beginning of the VHS boom and American movies were very well-distributed as opposed to other films. This is how I discovered all these movies.

My first love was for creatures. I always loved creature movies. I felt that monsters were always more interesting than the main characters. Like many people, I wanted to watch these movies for the boogey man or the creature that’s going to eat or kill somebody. I also got very interested in visual effects. This is a very important part of my love for movies. 

What did your friends and family think of your interest in monsters and horror movies?

[Laughs] This is a very interesting question! My family, I think, was quite happy for me. They understood that I wasn’t that good in school, so it was a way for me to feel close to something. My friends, of course, see me as some kind of freak, but not in a bad way! I remember when I was a kid during Halloween — we didn’t celebrate Halloween, per se —my parents had a big apartment, and we had a screen in every room, and I would put a different horror movie on in each room! I’d invite about 20 people over and everyone could watch a different horror movie. They thought that was fun. I think the friends that I have are pretty proud that all the passion I had for horror growing up has become my job. I think it’s positive.

 ACHOURA has been promoted as the first monster movie shot in Morocco. What took so long for Morocco to jump into horror? Is there a big horror culture in Morocco?

There is no, per se, horror culture. There is a lot of belief in black magic, and there’s a lot of imagery of the devil, but it’s not shared. Everything is kept within its own belief. I think it’s very culturally related. I think the whole Arab world has a huge culture, but it’s buried, you know? This part of the world doesn’t have the same way with images. Myself, I know much more about Christianity and Judaism through this imagery because I grew up reading history books, and there were these paintings representing Christ and The Devil. We don’t have this equivalent in the Arabic culture. But the stories are there. Most of these stories are shared orally.

Today, something is changing. Obviously, there are a lot of filmmakers who grew up in the same culture as me and who also want to tell these stories. Unfortunately, for now, we don’t hear that much because I think it’s all related to the situation in the world. But something is happening and there are many stories to tell. I’m pretty sure that it’s changing. We’re saying that this is really the first horror film from Morocco because it’s our moment. The worldwide audience today is ready to watch movies with subtitles — I’m thinking of you guys in North America. For a while, [the attitude] was like, “This movie could be interesting, but Americans will not care about it because it’s subtitled.” Today, thanks to Netflix and Amazon Prime and other streaming services, we’re watching the same program at the same time everywhere with subtitles. It could be Korean. It could be Mexican. It doesn’t matter. I think it’s changing. 

The industry is still very poor in Africa and the Middle East regarding the genre, but it is changing.

Let’s talk about ACHOURA. For us sheltered North Americans, would you mind explaining a little about the holiday of Ashura, especially as it’s celebrated in Morocco? I’m a little bit familiar with Ashura as a solemn occasion in Islam, so I was a little taken aback by the joyful “Children’s Night” aspect of it presented in the film.

ACHOURA started with the idea of trying to make a very popular movie. Mirages was quite “arthouse” in a way. I wanted to make something 100% fun. One of my references was Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners — that obviously changed during the making of the movie. I wanted to make something that had elements of fantasy and mystery. I didn’t want to make it very scary. That was not the first purpose. I was also thinking that I wanted to share a part of our culture. Mirages was about showing another side of this part of the world, not the side that you’re watching in the media with terrorism and poverty and women being beaten up — all these things we’re feeding, in a way, to the Occident. I was thinking of a cultural moment that is quite popular in Morocco that I could share with the rest of the world and use it in the way that John Carpenter used Halloween or the way other films have taken a celebration and transformed it into a horror moment. 

I was quite familiar with Ashura because I grew up in Morocco. I knew that in Morocco, Ashura is quite different than in the Middle East. [In Morocco] Ashura is very much about kids. It’s something like Christmas meets Halloween. It’s a moment where kids are outside and playing with each other. I lived these moments and kept those memories close. I thought, “What if a creature woke up at this moment and went out to eat children?” Ashura would obviously be the best moment for this creature to feed.

Speaking of the creature, what can you tell me about it? How did you come up with the Bougatate?

The name of the creature didn’t come until one of the last versions of the script. We knew that it was a demon — some kind of a Djinn. But there was not much information about Djinns on the internet. Once we were looking for a name of Djinn that was particularly popular in Morocco, we couldn’t really find that much. We found Bougatate, but it was quite different in the folklore. The Bougatate is a creature of sleep paralysis — when you’re sleeping but you’re partially awake and something is impeding your movement. People who believe in this folklore think that it’s this Djinn Bougatate who is sitting on you. This Djinn was the most popular in Morocco, so we started building something around it and around what we know about Djinns. There are good Djinns and bad Djinns. Bad Djinns usually feed on negative stuff. 

Morocco has quite a history because it was colonized by the French and Spanish. There was a lot of horrible stuff that happened. We thought maybe we could bring a part of this history into the film.

Why did you choose to realize the Bougatate digitally rather than with practical effects?

We actually worked with Jean-Christophe Spadaccini who is very famous in the special effects industry. He worked on Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s City of Lost Children and Delicatessen. He’s a legend in France. We started working with him very early because we originally wanted something like 50% practical effects and 50% digital effects, but you need a long time to prepare for that, and we didn’t have much time because of our budget. The ending budget was something like 1.3 million euros. The money arrived too late, so we had to adapt to the situation to make this creature. Once the creature was done, we were already in the second or third week of shooting. It’s very unfortunate. There were many shots of the practical creature that we had to erase because we couldn’t do it as we wanted. The movie became more expensive because we changed these moments with visual effects and visual effects are particularly expensive when you’re not prepared. This is my biggest regret in shooting ACHOURA. I would have loved to have had a practical creature in the movie.

 ACHOURA has been compared to Stephen King’s IT in the genre press. Do you feel those comparisons are fair?

Of course, Stephen King was one of the writers that I grew up with. IT, the miniseries, traumatized me. Totally traumatized me! It’s still traumatizing me. I tried to watch it again last year after the new movie came out. Tim Curry may be the ultimate boogeyman. Stephen King has touched something about the way we see ourselves both as adults and as kids as well as the relationship between being a kid and being a grown-up. What you did as a kid will define you as a grown-up. In this particular way, I was very interested in IT. When we started on ACHOURA in 2015, there wasn’t any talk of there being another adaptation of the book. We felt very confident that it was a good moment, and obviously, we were right because, as we were finishing the movie, Hollywood brought back King’s book. We were totally scared because we knew the comparison would be obvious. We felt also that it could be a blessing in a way, putting the spotlight on our smaller movie. We feared that we were going to be considered the poor version of IT. I saw Andy Muschietti’s movies, and they’re great. He captured very important moments from the book. Thematically, there are some connections between IT and ACHOURA, but the spirit is quite different. And, of course, we don’t have a clown!

What’s next?

I’m working on my next feature, Le Refuge (The Shelter). It’s a very Polanski-esque story — very tiny in a way. Most of the film is set in a single apartment with a few characters. It’s a very psychological-drama-horror movie. It’s something very different from ACHOURA. It’s probably closer to Mirages in a way — at least in the tempo of the movie. 

My other project is called Miara. It is a big passion project for me that I’ve been thinking of for ten years. It’s about a female Berber warrior in the eighth century in Morocco. It’s a very exciting project. This little girl who doesn’t have her parents is raised and trained by this old man. They live outside the city as hermits. One day a small Viking ship arrives, and suddenly, this girl discovers that her adopted father is a Viking king who fled his country many years before. It’s very tragic and Shakespearean in a way. This one is a long shot, but it’s a passion project, and we’re working on it. Hopefully, we’ll hear something soon.

 ACHOURA is available on VOD and DVD from Dark Star Pictures. You can keep up with Talal Selhami and his projects on Twitter @TalalSel and on Facebook

 

William J. Wright
William J. Wright is RUE MORGUE's online managing editor. A two-time Rondo Classic Horror Award nominee and an active member of the Horror Writers Association, William is lifelong lover of the weird and macabre. His work has appeared in many popular (and a few unpopular) publications dedicated to horror and cult film. William earned a bachelor of arts degree from East Tennessee State University in 1998, majoring in English with a minor in Film Studies. He helped establish ETSU's Film Studies minor with professor and film scholar Mary Hurd and was the program's first graduate. He currently lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, with his wife, three sons and a recalcitrant cat.