| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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BORN OF FIRE
Rating: 
UK. 1986.
Director/Story – Jamil Dehlavi, Screenplay – Raficq Abdulla, Producers – Jamil Dehlavi & Therese Pickard, Photography – Bruce McGowan, Insect Photography – Alaistair McEwan, Music – Colin Towns, Recitation of Prayers – Fevzi Misir, Special Effects – Special Effects Universal Ltd, Makeup – Julia Loizou, Art Direction – Michael Porter. Production Company – Dehlavi Films/Channel Four.
Cast:
Peter Firth (Paul Bergson), Suzan Crowley (The Woman), Nabil Shaban (The Silent One), Stefan Kalipha (Bilal), Oh-Tee (The Master Musician)
Plot: As a female astronomer enters the recital of flautist Paul Bergson he is troubled by visions and they both discover they see identical things. Before she expires Paul’s mother whispers the name of the Master Musician, a man Paul’s father went to to learn prolonged blowing techniques but returned from never playing again. And so, haunted by strange visions and precognitions, Paul and the woman astronomer travel to Turkey. There he realizes he must engage the Master Musician in a musical duel and find the never-ending note that will make the Master Musician bow to the will of Allah and stop the Earth being consumed by fire.
Born of Fire can probably lay credence to being the world’s first and only Islamic horror film. The note of caution that should be issued to the casual genre sampler is that director Dehlavi perceives the film as being of a more mystical nature than a horror film – this is surely the only horror film where the credits have a listing for the singing of Muslim prayers.
The constant profusion of weird imagery – the sun being eclipsed by a skull; houris who leave smoking footprints; weird elliptical flappings over of time; rivers of blood – does make it somewhat watchable, if wholly incomprehensible. Little of anything is explained – the imagery is intended to be everything. Given a schlockier plot this could have been quite entertaining – but Dehlavi only really intends this as some type of mystical insight. Alas one has no idea what any of this is meant to mean in the slightest – and one doubts that being of Islamic persuasion would help much either. If Dehlavi was a director of less lofty pretensions, the horror genre would no doubt have a welcome place for him. But all things considered the film has an enormous silliness – like the scene where Crowley gets possessed, rapes Firth, becomes pregnant in the space of an evening and gives birth to an insect while writhing and screaming on a bed. The result is like some Islamic equivalent of Zardoz (1974) – a film that has been wholly swallowed by the most absurd of pretensions.
Pakistani director Dehlavi has since gone on to direct the slightly more comprehensible but equally pretentious Immaculate Conception (1992) and the interesting Jinnah (1998), about the founding of the modern Pakistani nation.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1991
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