As the director of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Poltergeist, Tobe Hooper gets an eternal pass from fans of the horror genre, and with good reason. Unfortunately, the last feature he helmed before his death in 2017 may have been the worst, not that you’d have known given the way Djinn was buried and sent out with no accompanying fanfare whatsoever.
One of the first major productions to be funded by and shot in the United Arab Emirates, the Hollywood pedigree of Hooper returning to the world of supernatural chills was the number one selling point behind the project’s initial announcement. Shooting went off without a hitch in 2011, but then Djinn suddenly vanished without a trace, and ended up being quietly shuffled onto VOD two years later, but it wouldn’t even reach many markets until as late as 2015.
Part of the reason may be because it’s not very good, with a Rotten Tomatoes user rating of only nine percent complementing a 4.4/10 audience average on IMDb in all the wrong ways, but there were rumors emanating at the time that the Abu Dhabi royal family considered Djinn to be too “politically subversive”, and that the overtly “foreign” nature of horror as a whole was not appreciated by the local monarchy.
Wherever the truth lies in the end, one thing that can’t be argued is that Djinn marked an ignominious end to Hooper’s long and distinguished career behind the camera. On the plus side, it has made an unexpected comeback after being exhumed on the Starz worldwide watch-list per FlixPatrol, as if you needed any more proof that literally anything even vaguely promising scares can surge right around Halloween.