Eight- thirty in the morning is an odd time to watch horror films. But my formative years of watching them have mostly been at this hour when temple bells are ringing, joggers are jogging, school children are getting off buses, in the morning shows at Blue Moon and Blue Diamond in Brigade Road in Bangalore or in Excelsior and Filmistan in Chandni Chowk and Karol Bagh in Delhi. I would be waiting outside the hall furtively to let the crowd get in first, tentatively go to the ticket counter and quickly get it tendering exact change as the notice instructed. I would leave the theatre about 10 minutes before the film ended to make a quick getaway to the nearest bus stand, before any friend or a relative spotted me. Though chances are they were doing the same, and the reason I never came across anyone known was perhaps because they were in as much of a hurry to leave the premises.
As a result I never saw the beginning or the ending of a horror film those days. It didn’t matter because I was unlikely to discuss or analyse the film with anyone, like, say the unending deconstruction of the opening sequence of Three Colours Blue or The Seventh Seal, in later years. So, after blood-curdling sequences of a khooni darinda wreaking havoc with the body parts of a group of unsuspecting teens, with ear-splitting music and murderous screams in a darkened, cool cinema hall to come out to the hot blow of a Delhi summer forenoon would be jangling to the nerves. I would also be hot in the face of hating myself, an overbearing feeling of shame, of disgust, of guilt for having come to watch something so crass and banal. I would make all these pious promises never to do it again after sitting through a Purana Mandir till a Pyasa Shaitan came along.
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There is an old Mad comics gag which goes something like the producer of a horror film yelling at the exasperated director to show more skin. “We have to make sure it gets X-rated. Or how will the kids come in to watch?” he shouts. My morning show horror films had the same mantra, it was more sleaze than scare. Before a bloodlust monster with enlarging canines ripped apart a virginal maiden, she would always be having a shower in a negligee, often singing a song. When a gargoyle with glassy eyes, with blood dripping down its jaws and outstretched hairy arms was chasing a girl through misty woods in a mountainous terrain she would miraculously be in a bikini. If a sequence began with the handheld camera, to give the POV of the ghost, you can be sure it would meander through a dilapidated mansion with staircases which had dramatically lit stuffed birds of prey on their landings, to eventually peek through a window to a room with a four-poster bed where a young couple is making love. If it was a chudail or daayan film, the leading lady would be with blow-dried hair in an alluring see-through white sari sashaying on a rainy night. There would a voluptuous village belle whom the hero, one of the horror films regulars like Mohnish Bahl or Deepak Parashar or Hemant Birje, would finally save from the clutches of a living-dead devil with a steady stare, a lookalike of Boris Karloff who immortalised Frankenstein in Hollywood.
The supporting actors of the ’80s and ’90s Hindi horror films, which are dubbed “B-grade” now, were also regulars out of which many like Shakti Kapoor, Satish Shah, Sadashiv Amrapurkar, Gulshan Grover, to name a few, moved to better grades. But sadly, many others I remember only by the characters they played, ready stock for the various tropes in a typical horror film. There would be an old caretaker of the mansion in the jungle with bushy eyebrows and curly beard, always appearing from nooks and crannies with a lantern, who it would seem held many secrets in the beginning of the film but would later turn out to be just the caretaker. This caretaker would usually have a daughter dressed in the minimum of ghagra-cholis, whom the monster would devour first before it went after the lead cast. There would be a zamindar or a raja, either benevolent or a tyrant depending on where the script was going. There would a group of city slickers who came to the countryside where ghouls and ghosts held sway, there would be a local lad, with rippling muscles, who would help the hero in the climactic fight and usually perish saving him, or the local lad could be a lecherous villager ogling the city girls as they prance about in a stream. This character usually ended up as the next victim, after the caretaker’s daughter.
Nobody went to watch these films to be spooked. All veterans of this genre could see the jump-in-your-seat moment from a mile. The Samri or the Shaitan couldn’t scare an infant, their get-ups getting a guffaw than goose pimples, where in extreme close-up you could see the adhesive peeling off their masks, their bulbous fixed, fake eyes threatening to fall off any minute. The most expensive part of production must be the smoke machines, which they needed in plenty through the length of the film, to hang over lakes and streams, rising from the fields, in between tall trees, engulfing a whole haveli. A shot beginning with a foggy night meant the next 10 minutes would be ‘horror’. They would also have needed gallons of tomato ketchup, which is what it looked like they used for blood, as it had to come down from showers, fill up bath tubs, sometimes entire swimming pools. Time for the stock sound effects of creaking staircases, rusty gates opening, glass shattering, wolves crying, cats meowing, twigs breaking, winds howling. However, a horror film of this period can suddenly terrify too. An ’80s film, Phir Wahi Raat, directed by Danny Denzongpa with Rajesh Khanna in it, with music by R.D. Burman, therefore not so B-grade, where the heroine Kim hallucinates about an insane aunty played by yesteryear actor Shashikala, had a genuine scream moment when the girl sees the aunty in real.
In later years, these films have been critiqued as being exploitative, patriarchal, misogynist, sexist, classist, casteist and politically incorrect in a hundred ways. This article doesn’t have the scope to get into that debate. It’s curious that Hollywood having churned out some great horror films in the 1940s and ’50s, and even after international blockbusters like The Exorcist and The Omen which were already a decade old by the 80s, with a template set for sophisticated scare-films, unless I have missed some gems along the way, Hindi horror had to wait till a Raat came along in 1992, made by Ram Gopal Varma starring Revathy for some semblance of a mainstream film. Thirty years later Revathy’s brilliant Boothakaalam on OTT now, layered and slow-cooked horror, shows how much this genre has evolved.
(This appeared in the print edition as "Skin-deep Scary")
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