Ali Abbasi, who scored an Oscar nomination for his 2018 Un Certain Regard winner, Border, was a student in Tehran when he first heard of the serial killer Saeed Hanaei.
A religious extremist and veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, the Beast of Mashhad or the Spider Killer, as Hanaei became known, believed that sex workers were a “waste of blood” and set about “cleansing” the streets of the holy city where he lived with his wife and children.
The body of Zahra Dadkhosravi, his 16th known victim, was found in August 2001.
“This was a special time in Iran, because there was a so-called reform government in place, and there were limited freedoms,” Abbasi says. “And, strangely enough, there was a wave of serial killings. There was another guy, called the Bat of Tehran [Gholamreza Khoshroo Kurdieh], who raped and killed women and who inspired Saeed Hanaei. He was arrested. But then killings continued elsewhere.
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“It was a strange time, because the media was limited. The internet was up and running, but it was subject to governmental controls. There was no social media. We followed the story in Tehran. But there were so few details we weren’t sure it was really happening. We were asking if it was the same guy. It was almost like an urban myth. This story was almost buried.”
Details around the killings, when they finally emerged, were horrific, as were many responses. Hanaei, a self-styled Islamic Travis Bickle, claimed to be doing God’s “work”, and was heralded as a hero by certain hardline elements.
“Who is to be judged?” asked the conservative newspaper Jomhuri Islami. “Those who look to eradicate the sickness or those who stand at the root of the corruption?”
Right until the moment he was executed, in 2002, Hanaei was convinced that he would be “saved” from hanging.
Holy Spider, Abbasi’s fourth feature, is not just a portrait of a serial killer; it’s a portrait of the society that produces a serial killer
The killer’s 14-year-old son claimed his father was cleansing the Islamic republic: “If they kill him tomorrow, dozens will replace him,” said the teenager. “Since his arrest, 10 or 20 people have asked me to continue what my dad was doing. I say: Let’s wait and see.”
“It’s like how people talk about the rise of right-wing populism as a psychoanalytic response,” says Abbasi. “All these forces that you’ve been suppressing – xenophobia, racism, inferiority complex – appear as something else. I feel like – and this is my opinion – from the Iranian Revolution, in 1979, to around 2001, there was so much pressure on Iranian people. The revolution claimed so many lives, and then the Iran-Iraq War – the longest war of the 20th century – claimed hundred and thousands of lives and left millions injured and psychologically scarred. So there’s all this pressure from outside and then, from inside, a regime of extreme censorship and control. Someone like Hanaei was twisted by all of these forces.”
Holy Spider, Abbasi’s fourth feature, is not just a portrait of a serial killer; it’s also a portrait of the society that produces a serial killer. From the opening scene, in which a suspicious sex worker attempts to flee from Hanaei (played by Mehdi Bajestani) after he insists that she wear a burka, the film identifies with the women onscreen.
While most aspects of the script, whcih Abbasi wrote with Afshin Kamran Bahrami, carefully stick to period details from 2000 and 2001, the story is related through Arezoo Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi, in a Cannes-winning turn), a fictional woman journalist. The character was based on the real journalist featured in Maziar Bahari’s similarly themed 2002 documentary, Along Came a Spider. In Holy Spider, she not only risks her own life to unveil the killer but also endures everyday systemic oppression. A hotel worker warns her about her veil placement and insists they have no rooms. A friendly police detective is co-operative until he makes an unwanted pass. Based on Rahimi’s rebuttal of sexual advances made by her previous boss, a cleric suggests that her loose reputation precedes her.
“I started from wanting to follow Hanaei’s story very closely,” says the director. “And after a while, myself and my scriptwriter friend realised this guy’s not that exciting. This isn’t like Buffalo Bill trying to make a cocoon. What makes the story exciting is everything around it. The context and how people react to him and the setting of the city of Mashhad, which is both a holy and religious city and at the same time has a lot of prostitution. It became like a Persian film noir. We still kept a lot of things from reality. At the end of the movie, when they’re taking him for execution, those events actually happened. And the journalist exists. She used to work in Iran with a lot of human-trafficking cases and all. Now she works in Prague. The characters and the events all have a real core.”
If persons from inside Iran are involved with the film Holy Spider, they will surely receive punishment from the Cinema Organisation of Iran
— Mehdi Esmaeili of Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance
Holy Spider was a difficult production. Unable to shoot in Iran, Abbasi, who currently lives in Copenhagen, opted for Turkey. The Turkish government banned the production following pressure from the Iranian government. The film was finally shot in Jordan. During production, the Iranian authorities asked to see the film “in order to avoid possible consequences”.
Response from Iran has been extreme. When the film’s star, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, picked up the award for best actress at Cannes, hate mail rolled in. Ebrahimi, a former Iranian TV star, was forced to leave the country in 2008 after a personal tape of her and her boyfriend was leaked online. She received more than 200 death threats in the days after the Cannes award ceremony. Last June Mohammad-Mehdi Esmaeili, of Iran’s ministry of culture and Islamic guidance, said: “If persons from inside Iran are involved with the film Holy Spider, they will surely receive punishment from the Cinema Organisation of Iran.”
“The reaction itself wasn’t a surprise, I think the intensity of the reaction was,” says Abbasi. “You have to understand that this is, probably the first time in the whole history of Iranian cinema that there are blow-job scenes in a movie. I wasn’t expecting death threats or being compared with Salman Rushdie. I think there was a very conscious choice of words from their side. In a world where things are rational or logical, I don’t understand: what is the problem? But we are dealing with a regime which kills people indiscriminately.
Early on, some critics accused us of being exploitative. There were reviews saying: this guy loves to dwell on dead women’s bodies. I think some of these people feel differently now they see the reality of Iran
— Ali Abbasi
“I think it’s interesting to mention this is the ministry of culture and Islamic guidance, which sounds like the Islamic version of 1984. Our editor [Olivia Neergaard-Holm], for example, she got a court summons. We knew that really didn’t want to leave Iran. And now he’s living in different cities in Europe.”
In recent months Abbasi’s depiction of the crimes of Saeed Hanaei and the misogynistic society around him has gained additional traction. Last September the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody ignited a wave of female-led street protests. Within a month, at least 185 people were killed as a result of the government’s crackdown on demonstrators.
Holy Spider is consequently part of a much bigger conversation. Writing in Vogue, Taylor Antrim characterised Holy Spider as “suddenly … important viewing, a prescient report from the shadows of a brutal theocracy.”
“It is a very difficult moment, and it’s a huge moment,” says Abbasi. “Something that started as a protest is developing into a revolution. I wonder, as much as everyone else, what a revolution looks like in the 21st century. Because we saw the Arabic spring come and go. The entire context and meaning of our film have shifted. Early on, some critics accused us of being exploitative. There were reviews saying: this guy loves to dwell on dead women’s bodies. I think some of these people feel differently now they see the reality of Iran.
“It was important to show how prostitution looks in a country like Iran, where we have so many strict laws and regulations against sex outside marriage. It’s not a pleasant job; it’s a really tough job that you do out of desperation. But there’s been so many waves with this movie now. I’m getting more requests from feminist magazines and journalists. They are seeing the film from a radical feminist angle.”
Holy Spider opens on Friday, January 20th
