An Iranian prostitute killer is declared a martyr

He kills 16 women, after which he is arrested. He had set his sights on another 80. His victims are prostitutes, poor, mostly junkies. They are not human to him. In a long interview he gives before his execution, he says he has more trouble killing a chicken than a prostitute. His son – just a child – says that the streets should be cleared of prostitutes like a house of cockroaches.

The man’s name is Saeed Hanaei and he is Iran’s most famous serial killer. Between July 2000 and July 2001, the construction worker and war veteran was a murderer in the holy city of Mashad. Then he puts the bodies somewhere. He is called “the spider” because he entraps his victims like an eight-legged creature. Coincidentally, after his tenth victim, the drought ends. Hanaei understands the beginning of the rain as an encouragement from God.

In 2004, the documentary “And Along Came a Spider” by Persian-Canadian filmmaker and “Newsweek” reporter Maziar Bahari was released. He conducted the interview with Hananei before being hanged. He talks to the parents and children of the victims and to the prostitutes themselves and shows the fatal consequences of religious fanaticism, misogyny and a lack of education.

Bahari talks to an 18-year-old who was brutally beaten by her father, who broke her arms and legs, and who was thrown onto the street as a teenager by her drug-addicted husband. The police repeatedly arrested her and sentenced her to 180 lashes and then to 300 lashes. It hurt the first time, she says, but not the second time, because her skin was already quite thick from all the scars. She is sure that the next time she is arrested she will be executed. She doesn’t care. Your life is long gone.

At that time, Mashad had 5,000 prostitutes per 3 million inhabitants. The longest wait for a woman for a john was five minutes, such was the demand. Doing business with what is strictly forbidden in Islam was perilous, but a guaranteed source of income.

A father confesses to Bahari that he married his daughter when she was ten and saw her take to the streets when she was twenty and mother of six because her husband needed his money for a new wife. She fell victim to the spider on the street.

The children of another murdered woman feed and teach each other, it is heartbreaking to listen to them. To thousands, Hanaei is a martyr who wanted and did what was right for society. Popular protests broke out against his conviction. “And Along Came a Spider” can be seen on YouTube. After that, all you want to do is cry and vomit.

When Hanaei started killing in 2000, Ali Abbasi from Tehran was 19, and Hanaei marked the beginning of his college years with horror. In 2002 Abbasi emigrated to Denmark. And that is why «Holy Spider», Abbasis’s feature film about the spider, which is now on the Oscar shortlist for best foreign language film and which won the Best Actress award at Cannes, is considered a Danish film.

Once again we follow the «jihad against immorality», as Saeed (his name is now not Hanaei, but Azimi) calls it. Now the story has been fictionalized and packaged into a thriller whose creepiness lies not only in the crimes themselves. Abbasi learned a lot from Denmark as a filmmaker, for example from the merciless criminal naturalism of Danish series, with whose cinematic means he skilfully plays.

Mashad, whose nighttime streets cover the landscape like a glittering cobweb, is painted in the sombre yet rich colors of Nordic Noir. Wait a little longer for a quirky, quirky investigator like Saga Noren or Sarah Lund to show up, and there she is in the guise of the tough young investigative journalist Rahimi (Zar Amir-Ebrahimi), for whom no head can be too hot.

Rahimi is the character who takes us by the hand and drags us into Mashad’s horrific past. She is a modern woman in a world of the day before yesterday. Her headscarf, which she has never wanted to wear but has to, keeps slipping off. Only in the safety of her hotel room can she transform, let her hair down and wear jeans and a t-shirt, but only when she’s alone. It heralds future protests, just as the spider is a forerunner of the moral police.

The spider itself has a close relationship with the media, after each murder it reports to a certain newspaper and reveals the location of the last corpse, and nothing likes more than the reflection of its deeds in the media. The depiction of the murders themselves is profound. The difference between everyday family life and a bloody campaign is horrendous, and where there are overlaps, it becomes unbearably tense. Conjugal sex in the presence of a corpse is as precarious as it is perverse.

Most monstrous, however, is the wave of solidarity with Saeed, the self-righteous intolerance that grips women, men, children, but also large sections of the authorities in the face of the dead. And Saeed’s unwavering belief that he was doing the right thing. He sees himself as a partner of the police, and that suspicion can never be completely dispelled.

“Holy Spider” is a perfect thriller, pure crime, but above all a gripping film that teaches us a lot about a country and its women down to the smallest details. About her story, her misery, her courage and about her thousand good reasons to fight today for her rights and her country in memory of Mahsa Amini and all those who died before and after.

“Holy Spider” will hit theaters on January 12.