Egypt is one of the most productive countries for film in the Middle East producing almost three quarters of Arab production. Like most countries, the genres are varied but horror has quietly existed throughout the years.
While there is a plethora of films out there, it’s kind of hard to discover the horror cinema of Egypt. The IMDb is kind of useless when it comes to countries that aren’t the U.S. and there isn’t a lot of other options. Fortunately I came across a horror movie forum site (the Classic Horror Film Board) which had a ton of information about horror movies from Egypt.
Egypt has made a lot of diverse horror movies, mostly horror comedies or really cheap monster flicks but there are some cool supernatural films. The film most often mentioned it seems is the 1953 horror comedy Haram Alik which was a remake / rip-off of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. There is a ton of fantasy films featuring genies sometimes doing good things and bad things throughout the years. In the 1980’s filmmaker Muhammad Shabl made four different horror films. The first, Fangs, was a loose remake of The Rocky Horror Picture Show expect with Dracula as the bad guy. His next film The Talisman was more inspired by Evil Dead. But the first all-out horror movie was this 1945 film The Ambassador of Hell.
The film is a retelling of Faust. Director and star Youssef Wahbi plays the devil who wants to seduce and corrupt a- poor employee. The film looks like an old Universal horror movie, with Wahbi in full creepy devil make-up creeping out the poor sucker that he’s trying to corrupt. Unfortunately the film is hard to come by and again the only copy I could find didn’t have English subtitles so I had guess what was going on for the most part. Still an impressive looking film.
