Nadia Latif’s grandmother warned her about djinn. “If angels are good and devils are evil,” the theatre and film director remembers learning, “then the djinn is something in between.” As a child, she asked her grandmother what that really meant. “It means,” she was told, “that bad things happen to good people.” For rehearsals of Carmen Nasr’s stage adaptation of Babak Anvari’s 2016 Iranian horror movie, the djinn-haunted Under the Shadow, Latif has placed a protective evil eye to keep watch over the room. “Just in case,” she says.
The Bafta-winning Farsi horror film – performed on stage in English – is set in Tehran in 1988 as Iraq hurls missiles across the border, with the shadow of the 1979 Iranian revolution still hanging heavy over the country. Shideh, played in the film by Narges Rashidi, hides in her apartment with her doll-hugging, terrified daughter as the story unravels into a deeply political horror. Nightmare and reality collide as the supernatural being becomes an increasingly tangible presence in their home: rumours become real, apparitions stalk the night and opportunities for escape are steadily slashed. “It’s the beginning of most Persian conversations,” says the British-Iranian Leila Farzad, who follows her role as a knowledge-hungry academic in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia by playing Shideh on stage. “Before the revolution or after the revolution. Even 47 years later, it’s the thing that is most talked about. Enqelab, the word for revolution, is one of the first words you hear as an Iranian kid.”
