Tobe Hooper – the man behind The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Poltergeiest – is struggling to get his latest genre offering released as word behind the scenes is that the film’s producers are burying it…

Last March Hooper got behind te camera for Djinn, a supernatural horror flick that stars Khalid Laith, Razane Jammal, Aiysha Hart, Carole Abboud, Paul Luebke, and May El Calamawy.

Sounding like an Arabic ripoff of Paranormal Activity and Poltergeist, “The story follows a young Emirati couple who return home from the U.S. to discover that their new apartment in a luxury high-rise built on the site of an abandoned fishing village is also home to the malevolent beings known as “djinn.””

With the feature in post-production, news out of Italy (Movie Sushi) is that there are major problems behind the curtain — problems that range to the alleged payoff of the studio’s chairman. You can read a translation inside, and dig on a trio of new images (at least something good came out of this).Paolo Zelati translates:

“Rumors are swirling that someone close to Abu Dhabi’s royal family has seen the movie and does not appreciate its portrayal of the UAE and considers the movie to be politically subversive, and that they’ve paid off the studio’s chairman, Mohammed Al Mubarak, to bury it.

We have heard that even after the movie had a very successful earlier test screening in London, two other film companies even offered to buy it outright, but the chairman refused to hear their bids.

The whole cast and crew is furious with Imagenation [the studio]. They are telling everybody different stories. One actor in the film was even told by someone at the studio that it would never be released because it portrays a ‘witchcraft belief that the country does not acknowledge’. “That’s unbelievable!,” one source close to the production said. “Everybody knows what’s really going on but they’re afraid to talk because they think Al Mubarak will start a smear campaign against them in the Emirati pressn – which is not exactly fair or free.” ”