That scary movie...

When you think of "horror" in a present-day Hindi film, you'll likely picture actor Ram Kapoor-in-drag trying to seduce another Ram Kapoor. Apart from Humshakals terrifying the living daylights out of everyone who dared to watch Sajid Khan's return to disgrace (from Himmatwala), the horror movie scene in 2014 (Creature 3D, Ragini MMS 2, Pizza, etc) has been abysmal. The last film boasting some truly terrifying moments that comes to mind is Kannan Iyer's Ek Thi Daayan (2013), the first hour of which was inspired by Mukul Sharma's short story, and worked for its simple setting of a household where two little kids were terrified by their babysitter, played with a kind of spine-chilling calmness by Konkona Sen Sharma. But the second half of the film ventured into true Balaji mode (Ekta Kapoor was one of the film's producers) and a CGI-injected finale undid a lot of the film's initial crispness.

Therein lies the rub. The Hindi horror movie scene has been dotted with instances of rare brilliance, but largely made up of clichéd and done-to-death revenge stories concerning ghosts and troubled spirits, layered with a generous dose of music. Music, in fact, is almost considered to be one of the pre-requisites by most horror filmmakers, barring the likes of Ram Gopal Varma, who made effective scary dramas like Raat (1992) and Bhoot (2003) at a time when he still knew how to make movies.

The first instance of supernatural presence in a Hindi film, in fact, is engraved in our minds with the haunting voice of Lata Mangeshkar belting out "Aayega aanewaala", as a young Madhubala lured Ashok Kumar across the eponymous mahal. The song was an instant hit, and Mahal was one of the big money-spinners of 1949. The combination of chart-buster music and horror resulted in several hits like Bees Saal Baad (1962) and Gumnaam (1965) — both films boasted popular music, even while they provided ample scares.

The mantra, however, worked best for Vishesh Films, run by Bhatt brothers Mahesh and Mukesh, who reaped the benefits of the horror-music-erotica khichdi. Raaz (2002) was made on a shoestring budget with newcomers Bipasha Basu and Dino Morea, but while Nadeem Shravan's music lured the janata into the theatres, the tacky bhoot-pret angle did the trick. The Bhatts turned Raaz into a profitable franchise, and when the film's director Vikram Bhatt (not related) branched out on his own, he continued with the tradition, delivering critically-panned but profitable films like 1920 (2008) and its sequel, and Haunted 3D (2011).

These films followed the same template more or less: there was always a romantic angle, they were always shot on hill stations that provided a misty setting and all films had some sort of a garbled back-story, which resulted in a spirit/monster/ghost extracting revenge in present time. None of it was more absurd than Haunted 3D, the plot of which involved a man who gets killed by a woman when he tries to rape her, but who then returns to rape her as a ghost, following which the woman dies and returns as a ghost herself. You would think the madness stopped there, but the male ghost continued to rape the female ghost until a knight in shining armour came to rescue the female ghost from the male ghost.

It's the kind of movie you'd laugh at when drunk on a night with friends, but so is the case with most Hindi horror movies, including the hordes made by the Ramsay brothers, who specialized in B-grade horror films that more than earned their investment for nearly two decades (they hit paydirt with Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche in 1972). These were guilty pleasure films that did well with a target audience that was largely made up of men looking for cheap thrills in dark cinema halls.

The only filmmaker who came close to making horror films that stood the test of time was Varma, who made Raat soon after breaking on to the scene with Shiva (1990), and followed it up a decade later with the equally effective Bhoot, both involving the exorcism of its lead characters, played by Revathy and Urmila Matondkar respectively. In the latter, especially, Varma set the story in an apartment in Mumbai, his logic being that he would bring horror to a regular-looking household, and not one necessarily cut off from civilization, making the concept of fear that much more palpable. And it worked. But like with his gangster films, Varma went into overdrive, creating several lackluster horror films like the Darna series, Vastu Shastra (2004), Agyaat (2009) and the two Phoonk films, never being able to recreate fear effectively.

What horror in Bollywood needs is for mainstream directors to take on the genre, much like Roman Polanski did with Rosemary's Baby (1968), or the auteur Stanley Kubrick did with The Shining (1980), or what Richard Donner did with The Omen (1976). Hollywood, in the last few years, has seen the genre diversify into the found footage sub-genre (The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity) and the more mainstream slasher flicks (the Scream series), most of which have been ripped off by Hindi filmmakers to not great effect (Ragini MMS, Sssshhh, etc). What's interesting, however, is that the genre seems to finally be taken up by filmmakers with respectable resumes, among them Vikramaditya Motwane-Anurag Kashyap-Vikas Bahl's Phantom Films, that plans to make a bunch of horror films, and Anand Gandhi of Ship of Theseus fame, who is next producing Tumbad, a period supernatural drama.
And if filmmakers today need any inspiration, they can always re-watch Bimal Roy's Madhumati (1958) — not a horror film by any stretch of imagination, but the final act of which moves swiftly from regular revenge drama to supernatural brilliance, as the ghost of Madhumati exacts revenge on the evil Urganarayan. The best part: Roy never let us see it coming.