Horror Films in Bollywood.

Friday Poora Filmi Hai

A well made horror movie can induce fear in the bravest of hearts and poorly made horror movies can tickle the funny bones. So, it's a win-win situation watching a horror movie. I personally like them very much since childhood. Hollywood has been making some excellent horror movies since the days of Hitchcock, but the situation wasn't very jolly in Bollywood until RGV company made some plausible attempts at the toughest of all cinematic genres. Films like Bhoot, Darna Mana Hai, Vaastu Shastra, Kaal, etc. are the flag bearers of Indian horror movies.

Perhaps horror movies have started getting hit very recently, this doesn't mean horror movies are new to Bollywood. Way back in 1979, Sanjeev Kumar in an well fitting mane and blood curdling howls, appeared in Jaani Dushman. The surprisingly multistarred cast gave the film enough mileage to do decent business. But even this success couldn't lure cinema makers into investing into horror movies. Still, the genre was established and small producers were making decent profit from low-budget, 3rd grade horror movies. It seems, while urban areas and big centers were going ga-ga over mushy romance & dog-blood-sucking Dharamandra action, small centers were enticed by the icchadaari naags, gory looking walking corpses & ghost infested havelis.

When I was in college, Zee Cinema used to air a hindi horror movie every Thursday evening. We never used to miss the laugh riot! The story used to be more or less same. All of them used to have an old, abandoned haveli or some khazana or pyaasi aatma. Inadvertently, our hero and his hip looking girlfriend will land into the ground zero along with few just-to-die-after-two-reels friends. However deserted the haveli might be, a chaukidaar, enshrouded in a blanket (even in summers, anyway, it's always night in the bhoot-land), with a lantern will be there. And the shower will be working, so that our chick can bathe and the crowd can vasoolofy some money. The presence of one tantric baba is essential. When all the good-for-nothing friends are spent and the aatma now endangers the life of the leading couple, it's baba's responsibility to put the silver trishool through the bhoot's breast.

Even some of the actors were regulars, Puneet Issar always played to fighter friend, only to be killed by the aatma after putting up a fighting show. Archana Puran Singh played the bathing beauty - the damned shower always started to throw blood after a while! Most of them ended up to be plain cheap sleaze show, to satisfy the front benchers. The acting standards used to be really ludicrous and the make up and all was plain pathetic. These movies certainly had the virtue of being cheap, so to extract cost should have been very easy. Ramsey brothers made a fortune out of howling creatures and booties under shower (They later went ahead to make Zee Horror Show! That was just class apart! :))!

So, Ramu must be giving a new identity to horror movies in India, but the forget about all the horror films made in 80s and 90s would be to ignore a treasure. Zee Cinema shows some of them even today, but at very late hours. Watch them if you can, just can't miss the laugh riot.