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Abstract

Horror has a queer place in the history of Middle East cinema. Much like “queer” cinema itself, the horror genre appears to be absent, marginal, or otherwise forgotten in the region.1 Staging the simultaneity of these absences—of horror and of queerness—this essay turns to an exemplary and at times quite exceptional case in this overlooked history: Mohammed Shebl’s 1981 Anyab (أنياب), or Fangs, an unfaithful “Egyptianized” remake of Jim Sharman’s queer cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).2 A then he avily censored and now largely forgotten film, Anyab sits at the queer margins of both Egyptian cinema and global horror film history. At this precarious intersection, I theorize the film’s queerness as an aesthetic practice with political consequence. Anyab is, I argue, a class-conscious play with form, where the erotics of the text are specifically deployed to indict Egypt’s then-recent foray into global capitalism and its proliferation of a neoliberal “good life” fantasy. Against the larger cultural suspicions that associate queerness with Western bourgeois values, Anyab offers an elastic, adaptable, and often ambivalent framework for locating and negotiating the presence of insurgent, anticolonial queer epistemologies, aesthetics, and affective expressions within dominant Arab media histories, playfully contorting queer’s habitual reduction to content into an expansive elaboration of form.

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