It can be hard for a horror film to live in the shadow of another movie. It’s true of remakes – the new Child’s Play can’t help but be compared to the original – but these comparisons aren’t just the domain of remakes. Twenty years ago, the excellent Stir of Echoes was eclipsed by the shadow of The Sixth Sense because both movies dealt with characters that could contact ghosts. Sometimes, the kind of similarity is all it takes for one horror film to be swallowed up by another.
This is the case of Achoura, the Moroccan-made horror film from director Talal Selhami that made its North American premiere at Chicago’s Cinepocalypse festival. The film wrapped production in 2015, but in the four years since, Andy Muschetti’s adaptation of Stephen King’s IT: Chapter One was released and became a huge box office success and cultural sensation (with Chapter Two slated to hit screens this September). Despite being produced first – albeit years after the publication of King’s novel – Achoura is simply too similar to IT to get out from under the shadow of that killer clown.
It’s almost impossible to talk about the movie without invoking IT, which is too bad, because taken on its own, Achoura is an effective and atmospheric horror film about childhood fears and facing the demons of the past. It tells the story of a group of adults who reunite when their missing friend resurfaces after 25 years. They’re forced to face the horror of a monster that feeds on their fear. Does any of this sound familiar?
So it’s IT by way of North Africa, but Achoura works as its own story, too. I’m a sucker for any kind of regional folk horror, which describes Achoura accurately. The title doesn’t refer to the monster, but rather a religious celebration in which Moroccan children gather around a bonfire and splash water on one another. This ritual plays a small role in the film’s plot, but is mostly incidental – the bridge to a more innocent past, when the main characters first encountered the monster that would haunt their nightmares well into adulthood. The creature design is cool, more traditional Djinn than murderous clown, though rendered with more CG than I usually like in my movie monsters. It’s serviced well by the film’s shadowy photography, which keeps everything swathed in darkness and makes for an appropriately creepy atmosphere. This is, after all, a film about the thing that goes bump in the night, so it makes sense that director Selhami would capitalize on numerous childhood fears at once.
Achoura is well made and offers a unique look into the fears and folklore of another culture. That’s it’s so reminiscent of IT does it a disservice, even if the movie itself cannot be faulted for the comparison. It’s a serious, somber meditation on the death of innocence, bleaker than what Stephen King offers and full of powerful, evocative imagery all the way to its final moments. Here’s hoping the movie can crawl out from under the shadow of Pennywise and find its own audience.
