“Nāpāk Jism”: Vampirism as Queer Desire in Khwaja Sarfraz’s Zinda Laash (1967)

Abstract

This paper will study Khwaja Sarfraz’s, Zinda Laash
(1967), from a queer theoretical paradigm to explore the film’s
representation of queer masculinity and womanhood. Zinda Laash is the
story of a vampire who infects his victim with non-heterosexual desire, and
thus the threat posed by the film’s vampire protagonist, Tabani, is the
dismantling of heteronormativity. Based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897),
Zinda Laash imagines the figure of the vampire as a queer threat, and the
purpose of this paperisto explore queerrepresentation and queer desire in
the film. Tabani’s infection of his victims enables them to desire beyond
the confines of heterosexuality, and allows them to subvert
heteropatriarchal structures of marriage and family, by imagining
counter- normative ways of being, belonging, and expressing intimacy and
desire. Zinda Laash, as Pakistan’s first horror film, places the element of
danger and horror in the queer vampire body and through a queer
theoretical study of this film, we will argue that queerness on the Pakistani
cinematic screen has been represented as essentially monstrous and
represents social anxieties regarding anti- normative gender
performances and sexual identities.