Editorials
When ‘Hell’s Ground’ Brought Splatter Horror to Pakistan
April 12th, 2023 | By Musa Chaudhry
Omar Ali Khan’s Hell’s Ground (2007) is a lovingly curated ode to the films that inspired the filmmaker, throwing genre trappings and clichés into a pot and splicing them through the specificities of a Pakistani perspective. Khan builds a narrative that feels like a mix between Romero, Fulci, and Hooper while using techniques and homages that show reverence to everything from the slasher genre to the new French Extremity while being baked into the Pakistani aesthetics. What we’re left with is the first Pakistani splatter film with the filmmaking enthusiasm of Evil Dead since Khan, his cast and crew went out into the forest to make something weird, bloody, beautiful, and horrific. Hell’s Ground is the only Pakistani horror film with this level of carnage — but beyond the blood, Khan sneaks in political commentary as a means for expression, as it fights against a country’s artistic limitations.
The aesthetics of Hell’s Ground feel like a throwback to movies like The Last House on the Left, feeling as if this actually happened a long time ago, and this tape is all we have left of these people. However, once the violence erupts, the tone switches from hyper-realism to hyper-fantastical, with this bright red blood spewing and squirting from flesh as it’s being stabbed and torn apart. The brutality feels like it was inspired by the Italian giallo genre, while the performances and camera movements were borrowed from early 70s American horror. The collision of so many different influences creates a subgenre melting pot, and watching these influences spliced through a perspective that we have never seen on screen before creates a fresh kind of horror experience.
The story itself is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre meets Night of the Living Dead, using zombies as the inciting incident before throwing our characters into the forest being hunted by a family of killers. Hell’s Ground opens with a car crash at night, and as the driver looks around, he is attacked by a killer who’s eyes we are looking through, an homage to Carpenter’s Halloween. As this man is being stabbed and killed, we are introduced to the representation of violence that will be used, with stab wounds gushing blood. We will not be introduced to this killer again until about 45 minutes later, which is oddly about how long it takes for us to see Leatherface for the first time in the original Texas Chainsaw. Khan described this as a happy accident, but the choice itself was very intentional.
The rest of the film follows five friends who skip school to go to a rock concert, the original sin that leads to their suffering. The first of them we’re introduced to is Roxy (Rubya Chaudhry), who is seen in the opening berating her mom or maid (it is not made clear). Other characters include the guilt-stricken Ayesha (Rooshanie Ejaz) from a more conservative family, the son of a proud toilet cleaner named Simon (Haider Raza), OJ (Osman Khalid Butt) who is a stoner horror fan, and Vicky (Kunwar Ali Roshan) who is driving the van.
When we’re introduced to OJ, we are introduced to him waking up in his room, with walls and shelves covered in horror posters and props shouting out everything from Maniac to The Bride of Frankenstein. Once he wakes up, he begins watching a movie on his TV; it’s The Living Corpse, which is a Pakistani Dracula adaptation from the 1960s whose lead actor will cameo later on in the film. Right up front, Khan is not running away from the genre. He wants to make a horror movie in the vein of the other classic horror movies.
During the drive, the characters stop by a sweets shop in the middle of nowhere. Rehan (there’s your Dracula cameo) warns them of the road ahead, and they don’t listen because kids in these movies never do, and they’re off again. Another pitstop happens so OJ can run off and throw up all the sweets he was scarfing down, and this is when the zombie attack happens. We learn that toxic water is what’s turning people into flesh eating zombies (a callback to a previous pollution warning), which lumber along like the Romero zombies but are designed by Fulci standards – grotesque and as if their skin was turned inside out. OJ is bitten, but he somehow makes it back to the van and the kids drive off. Our lasting image of these zombies, before Khan turns this into a Texas Chainsaw homage, is of them sitting in a field, eating the intestines of nameless victims. What they’re pretending to eat are real animal intestines, so everything looks “authentic.”
Eventually, the van runs out of grass in the middle of a forest at night, and they have a rotting corpse in the back as OJ has begun his transformation into a zombie. One by one, these kids wander into the woods and are picked off by the main killer. Hell’s Ground becomes hauntingly gorgeous in this portion, with this white smoke enveloping the screen and trapping characters within this endless cycle of chaos. Characters are maimed and killed, a final girl survives by the skin of her teeth, and we end with a hint of the trauma that has been experienced. A 77-minute bullet that loves playing within the horror sandbox, where Khan creates a new iconic horror villain in the spirit of Leatherface.
The first time we see this new killer is unsettling to say the least. A giant, hulking man hidden underneath a dirty white burqa, which is a long and loose garment meant to cover a Muslim woman from head to toe. In this burqa we have a single hole, where we can see the killer’s eyes poking through. The weapon of choice? A steel chain with a spiked metal ball on the end that he can swing around his head a few times before launching it at potential victims. Once the ball contacts flesh, the skin explodes and blood bursts forward.
What makes the film transgressive, especially within the context of a Pakistani film industry that has had trouble finding momentum post-2000, is everything that’s been mentioned with regards to the violence — but also, there are these smaller details that we might take for granted in the West. In Pakistan, these moments feel like the introduction of new ideas that didn’t exist before. For instance, something as small as characters smoking a joint felt like a shock to the system because this hadn’t been explored on screen before. The duo of Simon and Ayesha showing feelings for one another and awkwardly trying to flirt felt new, and reflected a younger perspective on art that felt neglected.
Pakistan is mostly known for their dramatic TV serials in the vein of soap operas exploring issues faced by a very specific middle class existence, and while the themes discussed in these shows are relevant in the grand scheme of showing a cultural clash between traditional and modern values, the specificity of this experience is not universal within the country itself. Hell’s Ground is a reflection of a younger generation that was being neglected. We have five characters from different backgrounds and different social statuses and even different religions getting together in a van, hanging out, and going to a concert. The idea of these five characters being friends felt foreign within the Pakistani cinematic and television landscape. Khan’s goal was to try to explore a more authentic experience and then putting that experience through the meat grinder by shoving it into a horror picture.
Another subversive, subtle idea was to explore colorism within the Muslim and Pakistani society by having our final girl be of a darker complexion, giving movie screens a new face to root for. Hell’s Ground is a Texas Chain Saw homage but it also uses the general slasher rules that had been developed years later by movies like Halloween and Friday the 13th. In that sense, because Ayesha is the more conservative character who doesn’t want to smoke and who feels the most guilt for lying to her parents, she gets to be the one that survives. It feels small, but if you pay attention to Pakistani media, you’ll notice a lot of lighter skin complexions and not as many darker shades. Rooshanie Ejaz’s Ayesha is Khan’s response to this observation.
Hell’s Ground is the first and only Pakistani splatter film, and you can tell that Khan relished making a genre picture that paid homage to the movies he loved. It’s an adoring tribute to the cinematic works that helped shape Omar Ali Khan’s experiences, and that love reverberates from the screen in waves, but more than just an homage, Khan wanted to show us a new version of Pakistan through characters and stories that tend to be ignored within the larger Pakistani society. Khan has yet to make another film, and Pakistan doesn’t currently have the infrastructure in place to support an outsider like him. But at the very least, at least he got to etch his name in stone alongside his heroes, and nobody can take that away.
