Excess of beauty can also cause horror. The first time I found myself in a geography that was outrageously gorgeous and yet resembled the locale of horror movies was in the North American state of Montana. I had been spending a winter with an elderly and charming American couple up in their solitary wooden cottage up the snowy mountains. Once a home to famous dinosaurs, the sparsely populated province now had museums with the largest collection of dinosaur remains in the US. The gigantic remains were already scary enough for me, but as I trudged through the white witch that had carpeted desolate streets and cemeteries, I came across ghost towns that seemed abandoned by the residents after an epidemic or exhaustion of resources. Even the occasional sun seemed scary. The area also had a large population of Native Americans, who rode horses, loved hunting and ice fishing, and narrated tales about their bloody confrontations with the Whites. Vacationing in Montana, I suddenly recalled all those horror movies and was soon on to what would be the first of the three novels I discarded midway, 7 Hanging Lane.
Horror often arrives with a distinct landscape. Such is the intrinsic link that Gothic horror fiction derived both its nomenclature as well as aesthetics from Gothic architecture. Located in medieval buildings or their ruins, Gothic literature invoked an indecipherable dread and an intimidating religiosity. Since the genre of horror is marked by apparitions of the past and the dead emerging from their slumber, one needs old houses, graveyards, jungles and eerie lanes to intensify the emotion. Even when the protagonists live in a city, they visit an old mansion, a deserted fort, or just a basement. In Psycho (1960), the surface transaction takes place in a modern motel, but the nucleus is in the basement, an underground that dictates the script.
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Montana’s landscape had instantly gifted me a plot in whose opening sequence an old American woman takes an Israeli visitor to the basement of her cottage. Amid old rifles and stuffed carcasses of wild animals hanging on the wall, she narrates the evening she had shot her daughter dead. In the next episode of 7 Hanging Lane, a dog was found hanging from a tree. It wasn’t a coincidence that in the month of January when I wrote this sequence was born the great American Gothic writer Edgar Allan Poe in whose famous tale a cat was found hanging from a tree.
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Back home, Hindi horror movies have always found their home in an eerie landscape. At first it was the conventional haveli or a jungle when the genre was essentially about low-budget movies, associated with a revengeful ghost with a sumptuous dab of sleaze. The landscape transformed with the evolution and mainstreaming of the genre. As several frontline directors and actors discovered the thematic potential of horror, a small apartment was sufficient to invoke the emotion, an art Ram Gopal Varma pioneered in Kaun (1999). With the geographical limitations turning flexible, a horrified mindscape came to determine horror.
Several emotions are associated with horror—ghosts, zombies, supernatural, occult, eerie locale, mystery, gory murders—but unless it
invokes fear, it’s not horror. A single murder may cause horror, whereas a series of gory killings may cause terror but not horror. In that sense, the popular Hindi nomenclature “bhoot ki film” is just one aspect of the genre. One need not have a ghost in the narrative to cause fear, and the presence of ghosts may not lead to horror. It can be a benign and comic ghost like Naseeruddin Shah in Chamatkar (1992), or a saviour like a dead ancestor or a friend returning at an apt moment with a helping hand.
The evolution of the genre is a fascinating commentary on human life. The tales of ghosts and graveyards have been available in various cultures since ancient times, but horror as a genre emerged in the modern era. The avowed values of the modern era are scientific temper and rationality, and yet they couldn’t dilute the primeval human need to explore, or invent, the supernatural and hold vivid conversations with the apparitions. By destabilising one’s perception and sense of reality, horror transports you to a different mindscape. It unveils a primal part of our lives, a fascination for the dark and grisly. Horror movies are, then, at a philosophical level, both a rejoinder as well as a reminder to science about its alleged supremacy. An inordinately large number of people, many of whom otherwise rational and scientific, taking recourse to the supernatural is an invincible declaration about the simultaneous existence of multiple realities.
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The emotion is vividly described both in Greek and Sanskrit texts. Sanskrit poetics have well-delineated emotions of bhayanaka (dread) and vibhatsa (repulsion) among the nav rasa (nine emotions). These texts also emphasise on the landscape, as the bhayanaka rasa is achieved by dreadful noise, shadows, cries of jackals and owls, abandoned homes, stammering and trembling—metaphors one finds in modern horror cinema.
Aristotle writes in Poetics that a tragedy’s plot must be structured in a way so that “the one who is hearing the events unroll shudders with fear and feels pity at what happens”. However, fear was not a stable or sustained emotion in Greek plays. It was an ancillary emotion whose purpose was to bring catharsis.
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Similarly, bhayanaka, with Yamaraj as its presiding deity, is not a primary emotion, but a situational, receptive, fleeting one. The major rasas are sringara (love) and veera (valour) that define both characters and texts. The tale of Shakuntala is marked by sringara and that of Ravana by veera and krodha (anger). Ravana’s opponent turns fearful only when the rakshasa king turns angry.
One can argue that, philosophically, it is difficult for bhayanaka and vibhatsa to be primary emotions. It is difficult for someone to be in a state of permanent revulsion or fear, and hence in several traditions of Sanskrit dramas death was not depicted on the stage. But note that most tropes in the modern genre of horror are well chalked out in Sanskrit texts. If modern cinema has ghosts and zombies, ancient Indian tales had bhoot, pret and betaal, all carrying different connotations.
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But the greatness of a text lies in its ability to transcend the external conditions considered necessary to achieve an emotion. The greatest horror movies are perhaps those that don’t need any landscape, any ghost or zombie, even a play of shadow and sound. Movies in which the dead do not visit you, instead you live with the anticipation of being converted into a ghost. A man wakes up to find himself being metamorphosed into a giant vermin. The entire transaction from thereon takes place in his head, and increasingly turns dreadful. Such were the masterpieces of metaphysical horror that Kafka wrote. When a horror tale is located in the past, it may get disconnected from the ongoing drama of life. Horror arrives at your door from a distance. You can overcome it by resolving the past crisis, or redeeming the visiting ghosts. When it is about a psychic character, medical remedies are available. But if it’s happening with you every day, pervading the quotidian reality, the inescapable interiority of a character, the inner demons they confront, the ghosts of their own making, take the stage. A person carrying her own ghosts and graves within lives an altogether different category of horror. A horror that can’t be redeemed. A horror that has to be embraced and suffered.
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And then you realise that perhaps the biggest trope of the genre is death, that greatest eternal mystery. The dead come chasing you. All religions and philosophies and sciences have tried to explain it, and yet it’s an individual who confronts it in a lonely corner. Several cultures abound with stories about one’s struggle with the horror of impending death. In One Thousand and One Nights, facing the fear of a hanging sword, Scheherazade narrates a story every night in order to see the sun the next morning. Ingmar Bergman’s knight wagers his life and plays a game of chess with Death to delay his own demise and save his kingdom from the ravaging plague.
This, then, is an apt metaphor to decode horror movies. We go to horror cinema, we live a fictional horror to overcome death that constantly nibbles at us. In horror our lives are thus redeemed.
(This appeared in the print edition as "Fatal Attraction")
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