Born of Fire (1987)
Stoking the flames of the apocalypse with a unique horror story based on ancient myths
Directed by: Jamil Dehlavi
Cinematography by: Bruce McGowan
Country: United Kingdom
A source of destruction, cleansing, and creation, fire has
always played an essential role in life, both symbolically and literally. It
has the power to reduce things to ash, but from that ash, new growth emerges.
Fire can burn us, but it can also ignite passion and spark creativity. In Greek
mythology, Perseus stole fire from the gods and shared it with mortals, leading
to our growth and development. Fire is also the origin of our stories, where
our ancestors gathered around burning wood, sharing tales and songs in the
comforting warmth of the night.
In Jamil Dehlavi's surreal and fantastical horror film, Born
of Fire, fire and its counterpart, water, are explored for their spiritual
connection to music, life, and death. The film presents a molten river
of visual and narrative motifs that draw on Islamic beliefs and Arabic
mythology – inspirations that could fit Born of Fire within the folk horror
canon. The story begins with a scientist (Suzan Crowley, simply credited as The
Woman) who finds herself inexplicably drawn to a sensitive concert flautist
named Paul (Peter Firth) after she discovers strange solar phenomena and the
reanimation of extinct volcanos (though she doesn’t seem too concerned about
the massive death skull eclipsing the sun and filling the sky with blood
light). Despite her appearance triggering Paul to suffer ominous visions of
lizards, whirling dervishes, and a woman in a black burqa being thrown from a
cliff, the two form an instant bond, and after Paul’s ailing mother dies, he
and The Woman travel to Turkey on a search for The Master Musician, a legendary
music teacher who Paul’s father, a similarly famed flautist, sought before
dying under mysterious circumstances, leaving nothing but burnt remains.
Following his father's footsteps, Paul encounters Bilal
(Stefan Kalipha), a religious leader who knew Paul's father. Bilal reveals
that The Master Musician is a djinn, a powerful shapeshifting spirit created
from the heat of scorching winds. In Islamic texts, djinn are magical creatures
that live in realms beyond our own and, like humans, are believed to have free
will, meaning they can be good, evil, or something in-between. Though they’re
sometimes depicted as benevolent wish-granters, they’re often unpredictable and
dangerous sources of corruption. Dehlavi's djinn in the film leans towards the
latter, as Bilal explains that it’s channeling the spiritual energy of music to
draw the sun's fire to Earth, seeking to engulf the planet in flames. He
further explains that Paul’s father fell victim to the djinn’s wrath while
trying to uncover its secrets, and that the only way to defeat the djinn and
send the blasphemous creature back to its watery grave (waters are graveyards
of the djinn) is to harness the ancient power of the “never-ending note” using
the ney, a traditional Arabic flute-like instrument believed to induce
trance-like states and facilitate spiritual transcendence.
Communicating the idea of fire as both creative and destructive, it’s stated
that fire is the source of music itself, and to fight musical fire with musical
fire, Paul weaponizes the ney, opening himself as a conduit of divine
inspiration to overcome the unholy world-ender with his own scorching melodies.
Between Paul’s arrival in Turkey and his climactic musical
standoff with the djinn, Born of Fire is a fever-dream flood of psychosexual
imagery. The Woman, possessed by the djinn or possibly its reincarnated
servant, is at the center of this nightmarish exploration. The
unsettling sequences begin when she has forceful sex with Paul that borders on
rape; then, the following day, dressed in vertiginous white, she bleeds down
the equally white rock formations into the water below, fertilizing a pod of
eggs that birth wriggling leaches. She later retrieves a slimy chrysalis from a
small pool serving as an external womb, brings it to a cave, and places it in a
bug-infested stone cradle where a giant moth eventually hatches. Nothing
significant seems to happen with the moth, and I don’t know if it holds mythic
or religious significance, but it adds to the film’s overall unsettling tone.
Between those sequences, the many phallic instruments and rock formations, and
the vaginal/womblike pools, the disturbing reproductive and sexual metaphors
are out on freak parade. That’s surrealism for you.
To add even more strangeness to it all, before his death,
Paul’s father was also sexually involved with The Woman – or a version of her,
which is why it’s maybe a reincarnation thing – and she birthed a human son (played
by Nabil Shaban), who local villagers call “The Silent One.” A reclusive man with
brittle bone disease and shunned due to his cursed parentage and lack of speech,
The Silent One nevertheless becomes a pivotal character in the film. Following
the demise of The Woman arising from the complications of metaphysically
birthing a demon moth, Paul’s younger half-brother finds his voice in grief
over his mother’s death and assists Paul in defeating the djinn. Though it’s
tabloid television hours that Paul vaguely shagged the same woman as his dad
(i.e., his brother’s mom), the two siblings find a connection in their shared
loss and use it as spiritual fuel to save the world.
As much fun as the hallucinatory, Freudian plot is with its
esoteric themes about the transcendent power of music, Born of Fire is not
without flaws. It’s not unsympathetic to The Silent One, as his relationship
with The Woman is the emotional crux of the film – as is Shaban’s raw
performance – but it displays some otherizing attitudes toward the character,
portraying his physical disabilities as a result of being the offspring of a
demonic entity; a spiritual corruption manifesting in the physical. Additionally, he’s often referred to with dehumanizing terms
like "that thing," never even receiving a proper name. Similar
treatment extends to the only two female characters in the movie, known simply
as Mother and The Woman. The film seems to present womanhood as a binary, where
women are either pure and holy as mothers or devilish succubi, vessels of evil
that must be purified through destruction. Aside from representation issues, it could be argued that
the movie lacks character development and suffers from an abundance of
abstraction, but those details are often tertiary in the world of surrealist avant-garde
cinema, where conventional narratives take a backseat, and elusive storytelling
that resists immediate analysis and easy comprehension is embraced.
Born of Fire is a mood piece more than anything: one that
enthralls with its mystical arthouse folk horror, relying on its darkly
hypnotic audiovisual elements to create an immersive and unforgettable journey.
Jamil Dehlavi and cinematographer Bruce McGowan capture the breathtaking
Turkish landscapes and crumbling ancient ruins with bewitching location photography,
expressive lighting, and vivid color palettes. Combined with the eerie sound
design and Colin Towns's hauntingly apocalyptic score, which blends traditional
Eastern melodies and instruments with contemporary Western electronics, the
film possesses a deep otherworldly atmosphere and an ever-present sense of
doom. Particularly captivating are the scenes set in the Pamukkale hot springs,
with their tiered, lightly cascading pools and bleach-white limestone formations. The patient flow of
the pools reflects the elevated spiritual state that Paul must achieve to
defeat the djinn, and when flames encircle the water during Paul and his
brother's climactic musical confrontation, their fever-pitch war cries over the
stunning imagery transports the viewer to their own transcendent plane.
While it may have shortcomings, Born of Fire uses its
slippery surrealist filmmaking to create a mesmerizing dreamscape that skillfully
induces equal amounts of dread and awe. It’s a poetic, vibrant, singular
exploration of an underrepresented geography and culture in genre cinema that
leaves a long-lasting impression.
Distributed by: Vidmark Entertainment
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