2020 - 2020
Paranormal (Ma Wara Al-Tabia / ما وراء الطبيعة) landed on Netflix in November 2020 as the first Arabic-language Netflix original. Six episodes. One season. Created and largely directed by Amr Salama, adapted from Ahmed Khaled Tawfik's legendary Egyptian pulp horror series that has sold in the millions across the Arab world for decades. If you grew up anywhere between Cairo, Amman, Jeddah, or Beirut, odds are you or someone in your family has a dog-eared Tawfik paperback somewhere in the house. I hadn't read the books myself going in, and the show still pulled me into that world inside the first twenty minutes. Those books are a proper cultural inheritance in the region, a bit like what Stephen King is to American teenagers who came of age in the 80s.
The show drops us into 1969 Cairo, a richly reconstructed mid-century Egypt of heavy sedans, smoky cafes, Bakelite telephones, and linen suits. Our sceptic-in-chief is Dr. Refaat Ismail, a grumpy and stubborn hematologist who insists on a rational explanation for everything, played by Ahmed Amin in what I think is the role of his career. Refaat spends the series being dragged kicking and protesting into supernatural cases he refuses to believe in. Ghosts in a family villa. Jinn in the Western Desert. A cursed object. A ghost story that reaches back into his own childhood summer in Ismailia. Each episode is a self-contained case with a connective arc underneath, closer in shape to an old anthology detective show than to a modern season-long mystery box.
Ahmed Amin carries the show almost single-handed. He plays Refaat as a walking contradiction. A man of medicine and reason who cannot stop tripping over things his scalpel cannot explain, and who radiates a kind of chronic social awkwardness the camera refuses to flatter. He does a lot of the work from behind thick 70s glasses and a permanent frown. I found him genuinely watchable in a way Arabic television rarely lets its male leads be, which is to say human-scale and a bit pathetic rather than chiselled and heroic.
Razane Jammal plays Maggie McKillop, Refaat's Scottish-Egyptian old flame and scientific foil. Jammal is Lebanese, fluent in English, and brings a transatlantic swagger that plays well against Amin's buttoned-up Cairene anxiety. Their back-and-forth is the romantic spine of the show without ever becoming the point of it.
Around those two, the supporting ensemble is doing some of the quiet heavy lifting:
Ahmed Amin
Dr. Refaat Ismail
Reem Abdel Kader
Supporting
Tarek El-Ibiary
Raouf
Hala Fakher
The Grandmother
Amr Salama
Creator / Director
Razane Jammal
Maggie McKillop
Mervat Amin
Refaat's Mother
Samma Ibrahim
Howaida
The show also owes a debt to the late Ahmed Khaled Tawfik himself, who died in 2018 before he could see his creation adapted. Tawfik was a physician by training, which might explain why Refaat is written with such specific medical detail rather than as a generic learned man.
Underneath the ghost stories, Paranormal is a show about Egyptian modernity arguing with itself. Refaat is a proud product of post-revolutionary Nasser-era science, the secular technocrat class that was meant to drag the country into the future. Every case forces him to concede ground to older, village-rooted belief systems his mother and grandmother never stopped observing. The show is sympathetic to both sides. It takes folk belief seriously as part of who the characters are, while letting Refaat keep his scientific dignity. That tension is the show's engine, and it is a distinctly Egyptian one that Anglo horror rarely gets near.
It is also a show about memory. The Ismailia flashback arc is where the season's quiet grief sits, and it gives the ghost stories a reason to exist beyond jump scares. Amr Salama has said in interviews that he wanted the supernatural to feel like an extension of childhood trauma rather than a separate genre concern, and you can feel that running through the whole run.
Production-wise, the show punches well above most Arab television of the period. The 1969 Cairo streets are dressed with real care. Period cars, printed ads, clothing, and interiors all feel lived-in rather than costume-party. Night shoots in the Western Desert and at the Ismailia lake are genuinely beautiful. The score leans on nervous strings and warm Egyptian woodwinds, with a main theme that fans of the books immediately recognised as the right emotional key.
Some of the jump scares are a little obvious. Some of the CGI has dated already. None of that kills the atmosphere, because the atmosphere is doing most of its work through lighting, silence, and the look on Ahmed Amin's face.
If you want a reference point from elsewhere on this site, the closest neighbours are probably Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House, where the fear is grief-adjacent and the set dressing is doing real work. Paranormal is less polished than either, but it gets to the same emotional register from a very different direction.
Inside the region the response was warm and, in some quarters, ecstatic. Arab readers who had waited twenty years to see Tawfik adapted largely felt the show had done right by the books, which was the only test that actually mattered. English-language critics were more mixed, with some finding the pacing slow and the horror mechanics familiar. Fair enough. It is a show made for a specific audience first and for everyone else second, and it was always going to read differently outside its home.
A Season 2 was announced, and then quietly cancelled. Fan petitions followed. Netflix never officially explained the decision, though Salama has spoken about the pandemic scheduling chaos and the difficulty of reassembling the cast. That cancellation is the single most frustrating thing about the show. Season 1 ends in a way that clearly expects more, and there will now never be more. You watch it knowing that, and you adjust.
What it leaves behind matters more. Paranormal proved that an Arabic-language prestige drama could sit on Netflix's global front page and be enjoyed on its own terms, not as a subtitled curiosity. Everything the region has put on the platform since, from Alice in Borderland-adjacent genre experiments to the regional thriller boom alongside Tehran and The Spy, owes something to the door Salama and his team opened here.
The cultural firsts are real and worth honouring, but that is not the reason to watch. Watch for Ahmed Amin's performance, which deserves a second season that is never coming. Watch for a version of 1969 Cairo that Egyptian television had never quite put on screen at this scale. Watch for the unusual pleasure of a show that treats its grandmother's folk knowledge with the same respect it gives its hero's medical degree. Six episodes. A weekend's viewing. An honest adaptation of a book series that deserved one, made with care and cancelled too soon.
Ahmed Dash
Young Refaat
Aya Samaha
Recurring role
Enjy Kiwan
Supporting