A bout of bronchitis and news of Bollywood Crypt, a merchandising company focusing on the Indian and South Asian horror movie genre, was reason enough to binge-watch Hindi horror. Bollywood Crypt is run by Sandesh Shenoy, who also runs Cyclopean Eye Productions, a Metal and Electronics music label. Before diving into old favourites such as Veerana (1988), which incidentally is the first release from Bollywood Crypt, one has to get up to speed with recent grisly horror content.
Dread vision
The beautifully-shot, rain and dread-drenched Tumbbad (2018) subverts all genres from historical to horror and fairy tale. Tumbbad opens in 1947, with Vinayak telling his son the story of Hastar, the greedy son of the goddess of prosperity. When Hastar steals all the gold from his mother’s womb, the other gods attack him, but his mother saves him on the condition that he is forgotten and never worshipped. There are, however, greedy men who worship Hastar and are cursed.
The story goes back to the time when Vinayak was a boy and how he finds out Hastar’s secret. Directed by Rahi Anil Barve and Adesh Prasad, Tumbbad brings to mind Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. The simple story is rich in atmosphere and abounding in archetypes.
Whisper of wings
Prosit Roy’s Pari (2018) protests too much about not being a fairy tale. Apart from a pro-life sub text, there is a witch in the woods, a knight in shining armour, a pari (fairy) to be rescued from an evil spirit and a dragon. Some of the tropes have been subverted, the fairy is the daughter of an ifrit, a nasty piece of work, the witch in the woods is a victim and the dragon in the form of Professor Quasim Ali (Rajat Kapoor) uses a radical approach to hunting and killing the ifrit’s children. Anushka Sharma, who has also produced the film, gives the film her all as Rukhsana, the pari, but is too vanilla to be genuinely scary.
Like Pari, the Netflix mini-series Ghoul takes its concept from Arab folklore. Written and directed by Patrick Graham, the show is set in a dystopian future where India is in turmoil with numerous terror attacks. Dissenters are summarily bundled off to interrogation centres where they are ‘rehabilitated’ chillingly, called ‘wapasi’. The show follows fiercely-loyal new recruit Nida Rahim (Radhika Apte) and the interrogation of a dreaded terrorist Ali Saeed in a gloomy dank detention centre.
While the setting and premise are interesting, Ghoul suffers from too much atmosphere and too little plot, rapidly devolving into a muddled mess. Though the acting is uniformly good, there is not much anyone can do with their single-note characters. The scarier thing is that Graham conceived of the show based on a dream he had after reading about torture, which makes one wonder about his reading choices.
Kitsch comfort
When one talks of the Ramsay Brothers and their winning formula of scares and sleaze, Veerana along with Darwaza (1978) and Guest House (1980) among others come to mind. The movies all feature a decrepit mansion, a clunky monster, an ancient curse, stuffed animals glaring balefully, a twisted statue, a Thakur, nubile young women with a fascination for creepy empty spaces and showers, cobwebs, evil tantric priests, songs and crude humour.
Veerana has Kulbhushan Kharbanda as the Thakur, while Vijayendra Ghatge plays his younger brother. Jasmin plays Thakur’s daughter, Jasmin, who is possessed. The young actors, including Sahila Chadha and Hemant Birje share their character’s first name. It is either a case of cinema verité or laziness.
Humour comes in the form of Satish Shah, as the wannabe horror filmmaker Hitcock, Gulshan Grover as Raghu, the stoner helper and Rajendra Nath as the manager of Thakela Guest House. The Urdu is music to the ears with words like chamgadar (bat) tripping nicely off the tongue.
Bandh Darwaza (1990) is a Ramsay take on the Dracula story. While the opera cloak is a bit much, Lucy and Mina find echoes in Sapna and Bhanu. Kunika plays Kamya who makes a deal with the devil to win the love of her childhood crush, Kumar. Like all good morality plays, virtue is rewarded, vice punished and all comes right in the end, with Johnny Lever providing the laughs as Gopi, Thakur’s servant.
After binging on Ramsay Brothers’ offerings and before returning to the real world, there is one more film to be watched — Purana Mandir (1984) for its hilarious parody of Sholay.
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