Naturally, when I came across a Turkish horror movie, I had to watch it.  I’ve seen a lot of foreign horror movies, but never one from Turkey!  I have not seen any Turkish movies at all, so I really had no idea what to expect.

This got a LOT more explicit than I thought it would – there were some S&M-type orgy scenes – but the moments of culture shock I sometimes get with foreign movies was limited to a scene where the five male cops (the protagonists) are on their way to answer a distress call and start singing and dancing to a song on the radio.  And I mean they are getting down.

Naturally, the distress call is from a place where spooky stuff happens and they end up swerving off the road after hitting someone, and stumble upon the aforementioned orgy, led by a super creepy dude who is clearly in this for some religious purpose.  I might have expected there to be some cultural difference in that religious purpose, but the horror here doesn’t have a cultural barrier.  The surreal moments where the main protagonist (who I shall call “the cute cop”)

has these visions where he’s chatting with his uncle? boss? (might have been some translation issues in the subtitles here) made what was happening in the orgy cult that much weirder.  Possibly it’s more culturally acceptable for men and people in general to be attuned to the supernatural in Turkey, but I don’t think it would be too far-fetched for a dude in an American movie to have ghostly visions.  Maybe.  Maybe not.

If you have a taste for more foreign horror, try these:

Audition (1999) – This is one of my favorite horror movies ever.  It certainly has the surreal quality of Baskin mixed with the bizarre flavor of Japanese horror movies – before The Ring homogenized them.  Starts out like a romantic comedy and slowly turns into a nightmare.

Hell’s Ground (2007) – The first Pakistani horror movie I’d ever heard of.  Can’t say it was all that great, as it followed the generic storyline of five teens on a road trip who get lost, but their attacker does wear a burqa.