For a long time, haunting had a very defined pattern in Hindi cinema. Old mansions, deep woods, ruins, old forts - spooks always occupied spaces away from mainstream life. It was Ram Gopal Varma’s Bhoot (2003) that brought haunting right into the urban space; even crowded places were not safe anymore. At last, ghosts had infiltrated civilisation. I would call it the first conscious attempt to make horror mainstream as opposed to producing B-grade, campy flicks for fans.
The Ramsay Brothers, who dominated the horror scene for more than a decade, catered primarily to fans, and their subject matter, although immensely enjoyable, was limited primarily to monsters and creature-horror.
The Indian audience displays ambivalence towards horror. The typical attitude has been to treat horror as ridiculous and funny. Interest in seriously exploring the genre is relatively recent. Horror films have frequently been deemed “risky” projects; therefore, they remained in the realm of low-budget production for a long time.
After Bhoot, came 13B: Horror Has a New Address (2009), a film that truly made the Indian horror genre both mainstream and global. A bilingual film, the Tamil version was an enormous success. It used the Indian trope of watching daily soaps as the primary source of horror, yet the appeal of the film was universal.
The film starts out with a cozy domestic feel, and the fear creeps in rather slowly. The soap that the family is watching soon begins to unravel in their own lives, and gradually takes a truly sinister turn. The film feels a lot like reading M.R. James’ horror stories. The start is always friendly and inviting. Fear is steadily introduced, and it slowly becomes truly unnerving. Here, horror is subtle and deep, a storytelling technique that attracts a much bigger audience.
Today, horror is continuously reinventing itself. Current horror films are politically conscious, targeted towards non-horror audiences, and many of them are massive box-office successes, some even in India. Hollywood films like It Follows (2014), The Witch (2015), It (2017), and A Quiet Place (2018) have been both critically acclaimed and commercially successful.
Gone are the days when horror was created just for its fans; today horror is for everyone.
There is also increasing international interest in global horror cinema. Films like Under the Shadow (2016) and A Girl Who Walks Alone at Night (2014), have slowly started impacting the entire canvas of horror cinema. The critical and commercial success of Get Out (2017) acknowledges the use of horror as a medium of socio-political statement, in this case, racism. While scholarly works have repeatedly mentioned Night of the Living Dead (1968) as a statement on racism and lynching, mainstream has always viewed it as a Zombie film. Therefore, the overt political stance of Get Out makes it a landmark film.
In Bollywood too, we see a new style of horror film emerging, although this is still in a nascent stage - subversive and grounded. The three-part series Ghoul (2018) that hit Netflix recently is a dystopian, political horror. It sets up a world where sectarian violence is at its peak, secret detention centres are established and a military clampdown is in effect. The film also weaves in a demonic djinn into the plot. Rajkummar Rao and Shraddha Kapoor’s Stree, a horror comedy is set to be a social satire.
The most successful sub-genre of horror in Bollywood is horror comedy, and big stars have not shied away from dabbling in this category. Amitabh Bachchan starred in Bhootnath (2008) and Bhootnath Returns (2014). Shah Rukh Khan and Rani Mukherjee acted in Paheli, the remake of a relatively obscure film called Duvidha. Akshay Kumar and Vidya Balan’s Bhool Bhulaiyaa emerged as one of the most successful films of 2007. Many other films come to mind - Dharmendra and Rekha’s Ghazab, Salman Khan’s Hello Brother and Saif Ali Khan’s Go Goa Gone.
Rohit Shetty’s Golmaal Again (2017) too braided laughs and scares. Clearly, this is a horror masala code that Bollywood has cracked, and successfully used in different frameworks.
Yet, love of the supernatural and ghost stories has been an integral part of Indian culture. Ghost stories, mythology and folklore have always had huge appeal. One could argue that folklore is very different from horror, and fantasy films have utilised it successfully. Vikram Bhatt twisted the Savitri Satyavan story in Raaz (2002). He used the basic framework of What Lies Beneath (200) to tell a familiar story using Indian mythology. The film re-examines concepts such as marital fidelity and madness.
However, horror has much more scope for rediscovering myths and twisting them to create fear in the modern context. Pari (2018) attempted to integrate folk horror into a modern story using the legend of Ifrit (a demonic spirit from Bangladeshi folklore) to weave a complex story of abuse and survival. At the end of the day, Pari is a desperate struggle for survival of marginalised women in a deeply patriarchal structure. Similarly, Ek Thi Daayan (2013) tried to merge popular folklore with historical accounts to create a horror tale.
Both of these films failed at the box office; the narrative styles did not engage moviegoers. Somehow, when it comes to horror, the expectations are still coloured by Ramsay-style films, and therefore the crowd largely remains dismissive. Sohum Shah’s Tumbbad (2018), a period horror film rooted in a mythological tale seems promising in the possibilities it presents for mining legends.
Sangeeta Gopal, in her book Conjugations (2011), maintains that the Ramsay Brothers did not essentially make anything new. They just replaced the villain with the monster. Their films have all the usual masala elements—romance, comic sub-plot, drama, action—all that has changed is the addition of a monster.
Of course, this is gross oversimplification; however, nuanced horror tales are a rare commodity in Bollywood. Kamal Amrohi’s Mahal (1949) may be the only truly unsettling tale about a haunted mansion; but the film is not exactly a horror film. In the garb of a spooky film, it’s a tragic love story. Even though Bollywood has explored possession, and made some very good films on the subject, there is still plenty of untapped potential to delve into.
Traditionally, big stars have not worked in horror films. Again, Ram Gopal Varma was instrumental in changing this. He cast A-listers in Bhoot and this played a major factor in its success. Recently, Anushka Sharma acted in Pari (2018) and produced it too. Earlier, Reema Kagti’s Talaash (2012) boasted the huge star cast of Aamir Khan, Rani Mukherjee and Kareena Kapoor. Talaash was never marketed as a horror film because the makers were aware of the genre’s reputation. We are very likely to see a larger audience for horror, if stars like Deepika Padukone, Varun Dhawan, Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor decide to do horror films.
A shift in the ways in which horror is explored is also essential. Besides traversing new avenues of horror, Hindi cinema can also focus on sub-genres within horror that they have neglected. For example, there are very few Bollywood horror anthologies; slashers are seriously underexplored.
Another hindrance to the growth of horror is the fear of censorship and the current political environment. Subversion of religious dogmas has become increasingly risky. However, the horror genre also needs to realise its might. It is an excellent vehicle for expressing dissent and resistance. Horror has evolved, and Bollywood needs to embrace the global change.
(Aditi Sen is a professor of History based at Queen's University, Canada.)
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