In short: Siccin 2 (2015)

aka Sijjin 2

Hicran’s (Seyda Terzioglu) happy family life with her husband Adnan (Bulut Akkale) and their little son turns into pure horror when the child is squashed by a cupboard that could not and should not have fallen.

Because grief isn’t bad enough, Adnan turns into an abusive monster who very loudly puts the fault for the kid’s death squarely on Hicran’s shoulders. Then there are the visions of nasty and angry looking women, the nightmares – waking and sleeping – and various occurrences you could only explain with some supernatural force wanting our heroine ill.

A visit to a hodja (think a mix of priest, theological scholar and exorcist for the practical purposes of the film) suggests that Hircan is cursed by a particularly terrible curse only a female relative can lay on the victim, so she begins looking into her own family history. The things she’ll eventually learn are pretty horrible, even by horror movie family secret standards.

This second in Alper Mestçi’s only thematically connected series of Turkish witchcraft/possession horror movies often runs sideways to the sensibilities of comparable movies from the US or the UK, mixing the culturally conservative and the exploitative in ways I’m by now starting to see as very specific to Turkish cinema of the 2010s. There’s always more than a whiff of paternalism and misogyny around, but this is countered by how ineffective and often absent the film’s paternalistic protector figure tends to be. The hodja just loves to give advice but never does anything practical on camera, and is absolutely useless as help against the supernatural. In this context it is also interesting to observe how much of this plays like a classic melodrama, a traditionally female-centric genre, just a melodrama where the usual reasons for turned to eleven dramatics – and boy do the film and Terzioglu love those - have been replaced by curses, witches, and so on. Which does situate Siccin 2 nicely in that very traditional exploitation cinema position where a film perpetuates but also potentially subverts conservative cultural ideas at the same time.

On the more generically horror side of the equation, Mestçi loves to edit in quick, short, shocking moments of creepy, distorted looking faces and practical gore effects in ways that not always make it clear if this is happening inside of the characters’ minds, in the reality of the film, or only for the audience. This, particularly when combined with its high tension melodrama, and the film’s general eye for creepy shots of bleak countryside and city streets, gives Siccin 2 a rather nightmarish mood, or perhaps the feeling of reality getting out of whack through the influence of the malignant forces the curse has conjured up.

Siccîn (2014)

For reasons only known to herself, Öznur (Ebru Kaymakci) has been in rather mad love with her cousin, butcher Kudret (Koray Sahinbas) for a very long time. Even when a black magician (and apparently fortune-teller) foresees that her love will bring her death, she’s unrelenting.

Years later, some time after her lack of love drove her own husband to suicide, apparently, Öznur actually must have managed to sleep with Kudret, for she is now pregnant with his child. Alas, Kudret is now married to Nisa (Pinar Caglar Genctürk), with a blind daughter and a mostly paralysed and bedridden mother-in-law. He’s also, not to put to fine a point on it, a total piece of shit unwilling to take responsibility for anything he does or says: apparently, Öznur “tricked” him into sleeping with her; he’s also at best cold and often enough abusive to his wife, ignores his sick mother in law and sees her as a burden, and is even partially responsible for the sightlessness of his daughter. In any case, he prefers sitting around with his best male buddy to being at home with his family.

When Öznur tells him about her pregnancy, Kudret hits her while berating her to get an abortion, causing a miscarriage, for which he of course does not feel responsible at all.

Disappointingly, this is not a film about the bastard getting his comeuppance. Instead Öznur now goes back to the black magician from before to get him to devise a spell to make Kudret all hers. He’s going for some pig-based djinn conjuring that’s supposed to kill everyone of Kudret’s family but the guy himself. The results are nasty indeed, though not quite as Öznur wanted them to be.

This is the first of a pretty steadily running, and apparently rather popular and commercially successful, series of Turkish horror movies directed by Alper Mestçi. While I am a bit dubious about the film’s moral stance towards who is the greatest asshole in it (it certainly cuts Kudret much more slack than my concept of – admittedly very non-religious - ethical principles would allow), and do certainly find its treatment of Öznur as a character rather problematic, I really can’t argue with the film’s effectiveness as a horror movie. It has an admirable willingness to go into nasty and uncomfortable places, where the most helpless and innocent characters suffer in horrible ways as much as the guilty ones.

Interestingly, while the film’s text always seems to suggest a deeply moralizing streak based on what I assume to be the mainstream values of contemporary Turkish society, in practice, guilty and innocent are suffering alike, here, with punishment for wickedness only arriving once the less wicked characters have suffered and died. Things also do finish in a very sudden way that’s really more 70s downer horror ending than religious horror. As someone unfortunately not terribly knowledgeable about the way religion and worldly life come together to form public morality in Turkey, I’m not quite sure if the film is selling a more nihilist creed under the guise of Islamic horror (try reading something like the The Conjuring films without knowledge of Evangelical Christianity and Warren bullshit to understand what my problems with finding the proper interpretation is), or if this is how this kind of plot is supposed to work out and I’m just misreading it with culturally inappropriate eyes.

What I can say is that Siccîn does contain some highly effective and pleasantly unpleasant set pieces that suggest Mestçi to be a pretty ruthless director of the nastier business in horror. It’s not elegant filmmaking for most of the time, but then, this is clearly a film aiming for your guts and not for whatever organ is responsible for your aesthetic pleasure, really going for it quite unrelentingly once the plot gets going.

Musallat (2007)

Freshly married Suat (Burak Özçivit) has left his new wife Nurcan (Bigkem Karavus) behind in the small village in Turkey they both come from and has come to Berlin to earn the kind of money you just can’t make in a place like his home. He’s suffering rather badly under the separation from wife and home, as well as his isolation in a strange and xenophobic country whose language he doesn’t speak, with his childhood friend Metin (Ibrahim Can) his only real human contact. So it’s not much of a surprise that he falls into a deep depression.

There’s more than “just” psychological toil brewing for him, or rather, parts of this toil are caused by some kind of supernatural agency that brings with it visions and illusions, dreams-within-dreams-within-dreams and which seems to set out to further his inner and outer isolation. Eventually, things become so bad, Metin accompanies Suat to Istanbul where they seek the help of mystic (if any Turkish reader should have a better term for the man’s role, I’d be only too happy to be enlightened) Haci Burhan Kasavi (Kurtulus Sakiragaoglu). Things don’t work out terribly well for anyone involved, but at least a pretty classic Weird Tales kind of turn of events will enlighten the audience about what has been really going on here.

On a technical level, Musallat, Alper Mestçi’s first of quite a number of horror movies he has directed by now is not a terribly impressive film. It’s clearly made on a bit of a shoestring budget, cutting visual corners wherever it can, so camera work, lighting, production design and special effects tend to look cheap for most of the film’s running time, though there are a couple of pretty effective moments when it comes to the scarier stuff.

The script, however, is the good kind of interesting, much more interested in telling an actually story in a semi-twisty way than in delivering a series of shocks. This leads to a somewhat cumbersome structure with the truth of the matter taking up half an hour of the film’s running time in the end, not exactly helping make the film dramatic, yet it also provides Musallat the time to talk about some themes I haven’t seen often – if at all – treated in a horror movie before. Particularly the inclusion of Suat’s very specific to “foreigners” in Germany kind of culture shock and isolation is not something you’ll find shown in cinema, genre or not, very often and Musallat really manages to connect his feeling of having stepped into a different and crueller world very well to the supernatural shenanigans on a thematic as well as on an emotional level.

Obviously, I’m also rather fond of the film’s cultural specificity. Given that most possession movies we get to see around here feature the same (pop) cultural exorcism tropes of an Evangelical or Catholic bend, I’m all on board with learning what genre movie Ifrit are getting up to. How much or how little the film’s depiction has to do with actual Muslim and Turkish thought, practice, religion, or folklore, I’m not really in a position to judge (all my knowledge of jinn lore coming from a couple of blog posts or perhaps a Fortean Times article or two), but that it’s simply more interesting and new from my chair in Germany, I most certainly can say.


Musallat gets additional love from me for use of that much-loved (by me) and certainly well-worn trope of the tale we are watching being written down by a man in the process of bleeding out, something Lovecraft would have approved of rather a lot. Some things are clearly international.