D@bbe (Dabbe)

Hasan Karacadağ produced, directed and wrote the Turkish horror film D@bbe, released on 10 February 2006. His first feature, it opens the D@bbe series and adapts Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 Japanese horror film Kairo; an American version, Pulse, followed in 2006. D@bbe was seen by 539,381 people in Turkish cinemas.

The story begins with mysterious suicides in the United States, where people choose horrifying ways to die. A similar case follows in Turkey: when a young man named Tarık kills himself in Izmir, the police question his close friends. Cem, Sema and Hande had been receiving e-mails from Tarık, who had grown into something like an internet addict, and they keep receiving them after his death, now accompanied by terrifying images. Dreams and reality begin to merge, and Hande realises that the Dabbetül Arz, the beast that the Quran says heralds the end of the world, is beginning to come true. The cast includes Ümit Acar, Ebru Aykaç, Kaan Girgin and Serdar Özer.

The title refers to the Dabbetül Arz of the Surah An-Naml, whose nature scholars have never agreed on, and the film reads it as the internet. Karacadağ spent years in Japan working in horror, and Japanese influence shows.