A Popular Folkloric Horror Tale: The Jinn Wedding

The Jinn Wedding is perhaps one of the most prevalent and enduring folk horror beliefs in Anatolia, passed down through generations for centuries. While there are many different folk beliefs about jinn haunting people and sometimes places, the Jinn Wedding stands apart from similar tales in a notably positive way. Both the widespread presence of memorates about this belief across different regions and its more coherent narrative structure compared to other jinn-possession themed stories make the Jinn Wedding narratives from Anatolia and beyond worthy of examination.

What is the Jinn Wedding?

Before exploring the belief, it’s worth explaining what the Jinn Wedding is, something you might be familiar with from various horror films or stories told by our elders. The Jinn Wedding, while varying in certain elements depending on the region where the narrative takes place, is generally believed to be a supernatural phenomenon witnessed in rural areas. In this narrative, someone, typically during a long journey passing through a rural area by vehicle or on foot for any purpose, encounters lights and a celebration in the middle of nowhere, usually at night. The person who stumbles upon the Jinn Wedding either succumbs to curiosity and approaches the celebrating crowd to discover what’s happening, or is pulled into the wedding by one of the revelers. When they ask what’s going on, someone from the wedding responds with something like “we’re having a wedding celebration, come join us,” and immediately seats them at a feast table. As soon as they sit at the feast, they’re served what appears to be delicious food. After a lengthy banquet, it’s time to dance. Drums play and the dance begins. In many narratives, this is the point where things gradually start to go wrong. Because the person can never escape from that dance. The dance begins to feel never-ending. They dance continuously, and in some narratives, even when they try to stop dancing, they can’t due to the insistence of others. In most narratives, at some point, the person subjected to the wedding faints. When they wake up, either the guests have disappeared, or if they’re still present, their feet are backwards or they appear inhuman in some way. After the celebration ends, all the food remaining on the feast table has turned into human excrement, and the money scattered on the ground at the wedding has turned into onion peels (in many folk narratives, onion peels are said to be used as currency among jinn). These inhuman beings eagerly consume the filth on the table. When the person manages to return home in fear, dawn begins to break. But when they reach their home, the scene becomes even more horrifying. A stranger opens the door and asks where they’ve come from. When the person says this is their own home, that they lived here with their family, they’re told that the people they mention were the previous owners of the house, that they all died years ago. Yes, the dance at the wedding truly lasted for dozens, perhaps hundreds of years, and when the wedding ends, the world is completely different.

Folk Narratives and Fiction

As we can see, we’re dealing with a scenario that would make for a truly excellent horror film. Many elements of horror films and horror literature appear in Jinn Wedding narratives: otherworldly beings haunting a space and a person, time travel, objects transforming. However, it must be said that Turkish horror films, whose problems are too numerous to fully discuss, have either not used this folk belief at all or have used it very poorly. You can search for “cin düğünü” (Jinn Wedding) on Gizem Şimşek Kaya’s website, who has built an extensive archive on horror films, publishes her film critiques to see which films feature this theme. You can also see by watching these criticized films that most fall short compared to the successful folk narratives we described above.

However, the use of the Jinn Wedding theme in fictional works is not actually limited to Turkey. It’s possible to see narratives and works that directly reference the Jinn Wedding or remind us of it in both other Middle Eastern countries and Western nations.

For example, there’s a popular narrative in Kuwait about a singer named Noora Takkakah attending a jinn wedding. According to legend, Noora was once the most famous wedding singer in her country. She performed at the weddings of the wealthiest families and eventually became very wealthy herself. One night, during a period when she wasn’t actually working, she was invited to perform at a wedding that night. She initially declined, saying she wasn’t working that week. But the woman on the other end said she would pay double the normal rate if she performed. With that, Noora accepted the offer and hurriedly set off with her team. Noora mentioned throughout the journey that she had a strange feeling inside. When they arrived at the wedding venue, they realized they were in the middle of nowhere. The music was extremely loud and there was a huge crowd at the wedding area. The attendees’ clothing also appeared strange. When the woman who had invited her finally greeted Noora, she noticed the woman’s skin felt very hard. Noora ignored this and the woman invited her to the room where she wanted her to perform. Noora and her group began singing their songs. The attendees danced wildly. At this point, one of the group members faints. When Noora and another group member gathered around the collapsed woman, they momentarily turned their eyes to the guests and saw that instead of dancing, the attendees were jumping in place and their feet had transformed into goat hooves. At that moment, the fainted group member regained consciousness. They moved to another room to rest briefly. Noora told her group members that she had seen what they saw, but that they needed to keep playing or they wouldn’t be allowed to leave, that they had probably arrived at a jinn wedding. Although the group was frightened, they continued playing. At some point, the call to prayer (Azan) was heard and all the wedding guests instantly disappeared. As they fled the area in terror, they saw someone running toward them in fear. The person running toward the group thought Noora and her friends were jinn, while they thought he was a jinn. When the man asked “what are you doing in this abandoned house?” Noora and the members were horrified because the magnificent house where they had just been singing had transformed into a derelict building that no one had visited for hundreds of years. The narrative ends with a religious emphasis, with Noora realizing she should never make music again, that music calls jinn, and subsequently going on Hajj. Different versions of the story can be read in a Twitter thread and various Reddit posts.

As we can see, although elements like the feet being goat hooves instead of backwards as in Anatolian narratives, and music being what attracts the jinn (which we don’t encounter in Anatolian memorates) add variation, the Jinn Wedding narrative is also widespread in the Middle East, as shown by this example.

Iron Maiden and the Jinn Wedding

The phrase “Iron Maiden and the Jinn Wedding” might surprise those who haven’t really listened to Iron Maiden but have heard of them, but those who know the band’s songs and have read this far already know which song I’m talking about. Yes, “Dance of Death.” The song tells of a terrible event taking place in California’s Everglades region. A slightly intoxicated man, wandering through the Everglades, feels his hair standing on end. From behind the bushes, a “thing” leads him to a mysterious place. People are dancing and there’s a fire burning in the center. The man, in fear, follows the others toward the fire and realizes the flames don’t burn him. Then he begins dancing with the others. He dances and dances, and this dance never ends. He realizes the people he’s dancing with are the dead. By chance, a conflict breaks out and when attention shifts away from him, he escapes… Thus, the legendary heavy metal band Iron Maiden spreads the Jinn Wedding narrative to the world.

Joking aside, Iron Maiden and music critics from the Western world obviously don’t claim that this song is about a Jinn Wedding. After all, the malevolent beings in the song aren’t jinn but the dead. However, unintentionally, the narrative of being condemned to a dance that lasts for years demonstrates the universality of these narratives. Commentary on the song’s story suggests it was inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal or Voodoo magic.

That’s all we have to say for now about this folk horror belief.