When love bites

Like many others in the city, Noemia Lopes is looking forward to watching Twilight, the film that released on Friday. She’s excited about putting a face to the Edward Cullen she’s read about. More so, because the attractive, aloof, mysterious teenage vampire from Stephanie Meyer’s bestselling books is played by teen heartthrob Robert Pattinson. But unlike other Twilight fans — mostly teenagers who’ve followed Meyer’s books almost as avidly as they followed Harry Potter — Lopes is not a teenager. She’s a 24-year-old physiotherapist who says she can relate to Twilight’s protagonist Bella Swan and her boyfriend Cullen, like any teenager. “I know the concept of vampires is make-believe, but the issues the characters deal with are real,” says Lopes.

Twilight is the story of an American teenager, Bella Swan, who falls in love with her classmate Edward. But unlike the average teen love story, this one has a catch: Edward is a vampire. The film made waves with its US release last year; this week, the release of its sequel, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, is sending fans in the US into hysterics. (New Moon hits Mumbai screens on December 4).

Young, hip and hooked
While the supernaturals has always found an audience in India — as evidenced from the hit-and-miss Bollywood films of the past — now younger, urban audiences are lapping it up. Whether it’s the Twilight books and films, the unexpectedly-successful small-budget film Paranormal Activity, about a young couple and their haunted suburban home, or TV series like 'True Blood'. Keen to ride this wave, NDTV Imagine will also air a show on past-life regression this week, called 'Raaz Pichle Janam Ka'.

Thomas Abraham, managing director at Hachette India, publisher of the Twilight series, believes this genre has definitely become more popular in recent times. “The primary audience began with young adults, specifically teenage girls, and then expanded, first to young professionals, and now to older women,” he says. HBO’s 'True Blood' also has a considerable male following, says Shruti Bajpai, country manager of HBO Asia. Now people in their 20s and 30s are downloading the films and shows, swapping DVDs and books with friends and indulging in water cooler-conversations about Bella and Ed, Katie and Micah (the protagonists of Paranormal Activity).

Hot vampires, sexy FX
So what’s with the paranormal becoming so popular? According to Axis Bank employee Pallavi Mitra, 26, the concept of vampires has changed from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to a hotter, more believable Edward Cullen. “Meyer makes the vampire look good,” she says. “She makes you want to fall in love with a vampire.”

More importantly, the characters in these works of fiction are themselves young, hip and urban, and grappling with everyday issues like any of us. Jane D’souza, 24, copywriter at an advertising agency, feels she can “relate to” the problems faced by these characters because they “could be actual people with actual problems”.

While the earlier films and TV shows showed the characters as distinctly good or evil, the new versions bring out the grey in them. “This is not your usual storytelling,” says Bajpai. “It’s edgy, exciting and multi-layered. It makes your imagination go beyond the ordinary, but not to the ridiculous. It brings out the ‘human’ in a vampire.”

Then there is the thrill and fear of the unknown. Once Paranormal Activity was touted, online, as the scariest and most-believable of supernatural films in recent times, everyone wanted to see it. The film, made for a paltry $15,000, went on to gross $100 million in the US.

Ghosts are people too
“Rather than flat-out reject the idea, I’m willing to admit that it could be a reality in some part of the world,” says freelance assistant director Kartik Mahajan, 23, who is addicted to 'True Blood'.

Like so many things that have found a platform via social networking, Paranormal Activity owes its success to Facebook and Twitter. True Blood, too, has a Facebook community dedicated to it, with friend requests being sent out “from a vampire”, says Bajpai of HBO. “I’m not a fan of the genre, but even I would be intrigued by a friend request from a vampire,” she adds.

Not ‘tacky’ anymore
Besides the urban setting and the real-people hook, the new films/shows also have great special effects. “This is a generation that relates better to a show like Charmed because the characters are wearing Armani and Givenchy, rather than a Ramsay production with green goo and a sari-clad woman spirit,” says KP Jayashankar, professor at the Centre of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

Most Indian youngsters today find this Bollywood brand of horror tacky. “We relate to Edward and Bella more than Indian actors dealing with spirits in a haveli,” says freelance writer Roanna Fernandes, 22.

Adds Ranjan Singh, marketing head, PVR Pictures, which is bringing the Twilight films to India: “Urban, English-speaking youngsters with access to social networking sites already know of the film’s popularity, and want to know what the hype is about.”

Psychiatrist Rajendra Barve, however, believes the fascination with the paranormal is just a fad. “It becomes an issue of peer prestige: one kid watches it, tells his friend about it and slowly everyone gets hooked,” he says. He also scoffs at the idea of “the MTV Roadies generation” getting a kick out of “God, gossip and ghosts”.

But Anjali Monteiro, professor of Media and Cultural Studies at TISS, believes there’s a difference between deriving pleasure from narratives that explore the paranormal, and actually believing it to be true. “It would be simplistic to dub teens who enjoy these as superstitious and backward,” she says.