You're right that this was not at all an Iranian movie (not even filmed in Iran at all), but neither was "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night", which is an American production by an American filmmaker of Iranian-Azeri descent. Babak Anvari is also Iranian of ethnic Azeri background. For better or worse, within Iran and among Iranians in the diaspora, the film industry is almost totally dominated by ethnic Azeri Iranians, who are now the majority population in Tehran and claim they represent Iranian culture, which they don't. Even the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei and the current President, Hassan Rouhani, are ethnic Azeris. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was very popular simply for being one of the few non-Azeri Iranians to be allowed to run for the presidency. The only other non-Azeri politician in Iran to have been president was Hashem Rafsanjani.
But I digress. There is no domestic market for horror movies in Iran. Most audiences in Iran aren't interested in horror. The closest you'll ever find to "horror" in Iran are movies about the Iran-Iraq War, and how the Iraqis tortured the hell out of Iranian POWs and went around raping and murdering Iranian women and children when Saddam's forces invaded southern Iran in a series of surprise attacks. All true stories, by the way.
So, Iranian horror, as a genre actually existing in Iran, does not exist yet, and I highly doubt the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance would ever in a million years approve any kind of horror film for the domestic market -- hell, they don't even allow 90% of the films actually produced in Iran to be shown in Iran, like "A Separation." That's why filmmakers in Iran for the last twenty years or secure funding and distribution rights outside of Iran before they even begin filming, because they know the chances are very low that the Iranian censors will actually allow their films to be shown domestically. But the Iranian censors have no problem with banned films being shown overseas because it's good public relations to do so and it helps boost tourism, so in a way, they all win.
Lastly, most people in Iran despise the so-called "Iranian-American community" of Los Angeles and anything it produces -- "A Girl Walks Home at Night" was thoroughly trashed by bloggers in Iran, especially for the fact that its conflating Azeri culture as somehow being "Persian," which it is not. Disgusting unibrows = Azeri women. Ugh.
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