'Most ’80s horror films were almost exclusively made for the wolf-whistling, scare-seeking male. “People lined outside theatres for my movies because they were entertaining,” says Shyam Ramsay, who comes from the family that made India’s first zombie movie
Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche (1972), and also worked on other horror hits like
Darwaza (1978),
Purana Mandir (1984),
Veerana (1988) and
Purani Haveli (1989). “I sold my movies on sex and bhatakti aatmas [wandering spirits].” So popular were the Ramsays’ smutty scarefests that by the end of the decade, it was impossible for audiences to expect anything else from a horror movie. No other filmmaker wanted to dirty their hands with the genre, until
Ram Gopal Varma made
Raat (1992) and Vikram Bhatt made
Raaz (2002).
In contrast, the new batch of movies actually makes horror sound cool. There are no (...) sinister watchmen, (...) no dense jungles and definitely no skeletons. This time, the locations are real, the scenarios are believable, the details authentic. “The reason
Ragini MMS (2011) worked was because it was marketed like a date movie with supernatural elements,” says Suparn Varma, director of
Aatma. “People bought the plot because they could believe it. Couples do go to hotels on date nights. They just don’t expect it to become a threesome with a ghost! This movie made them believe that it could happen to them.” And that’s probably the biggest difference. The horror fantasy is rooted deeply enough in reality to make it seem plausible. (...) In
Go Goa Gone, three friends on a trip to Goa realise that what they’re actually being attacked by are zombies! "You forget that it’s a movie and start relating it to your life,” says Raj Nidimoru, one half of director duo Raj & DK and maker of
Go Goa Gone. “That is when horror grips you and puts you on the edge. Like they say, truth is stranger and scarier than fiction.”
What’s in a tagline?
The next time you watch a horror movie, note the tagline. It will feature terms like ‘zom-com’, ‘supernatural-thriller’, ‘psych-thriller’, ‘thriller-drama’ and ‘neo-noir’. No one seems to be marketing simple scares anymore, and it’s all because horror has become more than vengeful monsters and bloody rampages. (...) Incidentally when Kannan Iyer, director of Ek Thi Daayan, started working on the script 10 years ago, he never saw it as a horror film. He saw it only as a suspense drama. “I still don’t know if it falls in the horror genre,” Iyer says. (...) “But that’s the thing; horror has evolved so much in the last 10 years that it has sub-genres now.” Suparn Varma explains that the taglines are a reflection of how horror movies aren’t just about horror anymore. They’re also about drama, action, suspense and even comedy today. “You make a movie for an audience - the ones that expect a ghost and the ones that expect a story - you cannot afford to alienate any one group,” he says. “You have to balance both sensibilities. And what is real is never one-dimensional. It is always layered and so are these movies.”
Fright choice, baby (...)
There’s a new crop of directors who’ve dared to experiment with the genre. (...) "I wanted my first film to be different. That’s why I worked on this idea for 10 years," he [
Iyer] says. "When Emraan [Hashmi] heard the script, he loved it and when filmmaker
Ekta Kapoor heard it, she wanted to start immediately." Iyer also explains that casting and roping in A-list backers have been the most efficient tools in raising the profile of what was once a B-grade genre. (...) Director-producer Mahesh Bhatt begs to differ. He believes that the star cast is inconsequential. “Emraan Hashmi was the lead in
Raaz 3 and
Ek Thi Daayan. Yet,
Ek Thi... could not manage a decent opening,” he says. He believes that the only formula that works today is mass appeal. “
Ek Thi Daayan was a good movie but it was made for a critical audience.
Raaz 3 clicked with the public because it had everything that a filmgoer wants - strong script, good music, believable horror, desire, obsession and sex.”
Ghost in the machine (...)
“If you can’t plant the seed of doubt in your audience’s minds, you’ve failed as a horror filmmaker,” says Iyer. There’s no room for grave errors (pun intended) and the best way to avoid them is with technology. While Ramsay and his generation had to rely on tacky make-up and poor computer graphics (remember Do Gaz Zameen’s cartoonish zombies?), the new filmmakers happily deploy cutting-edge computer graphics (CG), customised prosthetics, a dedicated visual effects team, 3D and Dolby sound to make the supernatural look perfectly natural. (...) "For Aatma, the CG artists started working with me months before we started shooting," Suparn Varma recalls. "Bad graphics mean that your audience will walk out of the movie laughing instead of being petrified." He also used Dolby surround sound to create the necessary atmospherics. (...) Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who played a menacing spirit in the film, has a good laugh too: "If you thought I was scary in Aatma, the credit should go to the technical team. They made a docile man like me look so demonic on screen." (...) For Go Goa Gone, the filmmakers needed realistic versions of the undead monsters we know from Hollywood flicks. “We knew we couldn’t fool the audience with amateur stuff. The zombies had to look convincing,” says Raj. So they used prosthetics. The duo spent a lot of time storyboarding the film just to understand where they could pull off the look using just prosthetics and where they needed computer graphics.
The future looks scary
That is what it takes to make a supernatural movie these days. Everything from background score, music, lights, colour-grading [the colour tone in which the film is set], to ambient sound is thoroughly studied. “A still shot with no action can scare the audience if the background score kicks in just before or after the audience expects it,” says Suparn Varma. It explains why there are now big names backing the genre. Vishal Bhardwaj and Ekta Kapoor produced Ek Thi Daayan. (...) Raj & DK, on the other hand, have Saif Ali Khan as the producer of their film'.
