Skip to main content

Ingredients for Bollywood Horror films

Director, producers, actors, writers and editors who take Norman Bates line - 'Sometimes we all go mad' - a bit too seriously.

They give us characters who do not heed a fine advice given by Count Dracula to Jonathan Harker:  'You may go wherever you wish in the castle except where the doors are locked, where of course, you will not wish to go.' Nobody in horror films, made in any part of the world, takes Dracula's word seriously.

They would like to produce a vision of Shirley Jackson, 'No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.'

So larks and katydids of Bollywood dreamt of :


Comments

  1. Apologies in advance, Vinayak. You're probably going to say "Oh no, there she goes again"!
    But I simply have to hark back (in that insuuferable हमारे ज़माने में tone) to some amazingly awful Ramsay Brothers classics! My personal all-time favourite remains "Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche". However, my sibling, peering over my shoulder at your post, reminds me of other fine examples of the Ramsays' oevre such as "Dahshat" and "Tehkhana" and "Saamri" and "Shaitaani Ilaaka".
    What were the hallmarks of these rampagingly B-grade films? Cheap humour, barely-clad female leads (is that a redundant phrase?), eye-poppingly bad "special effects" and villains who seemed to thrive on a diet of pleasantly plump ladies. And oh yes, there was sex, or as much as the ruthless, rain-on-my-horror-parade Censor Board would allow.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The very first movie I ever saw on a VCP was Dracula (1958). Its end sequence and the carriage thing just mesmerized me and hooked me to cinema. Then years later, when cable still wasn't huge, I enjoyed 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents'(1955) and 'The Twilight Zone' on good old PTV (they had the best syndicated content). That really saved me because आपका ज़माना तो भी अच्छा था... most horror films made in 90s made Ramsays' entire oeuvre look tame 'G' rated stuff. 'Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche' was a fine horror film. Sleaze was kept to minimum. But then with every subsequent film they made, Ramsay brothers kept throwing in more and more sleaze. And then real peddlers of sleaze displaced them, killing the genre for some time. I am not a big fan of recent horror movies - recent RGV kind ( or any of his kind anymore. After watching a midget knife-fight in his 'new' Shiva (2006), I thought either his has gone completely cuckoo or he has half-slipped into David Lynch zone). But at the start of 90s, he was a ray of hope. His Raat (1992) sure gave me scare back then, mostly because of crazy camera work and sound - without doubt Ram Gopal Varma's strength, when he doesn't overdo it. He repeated and bettered the trick for his year 1996 Telugu film Deyyam (Ghost. Dubbed as 'Peye' in Tamil ). It is one of his all time best.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I always like to hear back :)
However, irrelevant comments and irrelevant links will not be published. Needless to say, same goes for abusive comment and spam. Leaving back links related to the topic is encouraged. I know it can be tempting but try not to leave your email ids, phone nos and CVs in the comment.

Popular posts from this blog

Famous Old Faces of Doordarshan

Some people recall the faces and some people recall the names. Here are images of some of the famous readers and presenters of Doordarshan down the years. If you recognize any of them, leave a comment. [ Update 1 : Most of the faces now have names thanks to helpful comments by olio-gallimaufry ] [ Update 2 : Included image of one of the earliest presenters, Gopal Kaul. Send in generously from personal collection by son, Ashutosh Kaul. Sept, 2010.] [ Major Update 3: Got a tip-off about a documentary about the famous faces of Doordarshan from the makers   of     “The Golden Trail , DD@50 :Special feature on Golden Jubilee of Doordarshan ” from which these caps were taken. I managed to catch the incredible documentary and am adding some more faces/name and part of the docu here. New ones can be found after the image of  Narotam Puri. 30th Oct, 2010]  Pratima Puri. Believed to be the first Doordarshan reader.

Indian Cigarette Vintage Ads

He put a cigarette in his mouth and, as a matter of silent routine, offered one to Gwyn, who said ‘No thanks.”Richard looked at him.”I packed it in.”"You what?”"I stopped. Three days ago. Cold. That’s it. You just make the life choice.” Richard looked up and inhaled needfully. He gazed at his cigarette. He didn’t really want to smoke it. He wanted to eat it. Almost the only thing that he still liked about Gwyn was that he still smoked…Paradoxically, he no longer wanted to give up smoking: what he wanted to do was take up smoking. Not so much to fill the little gaps between cigarettes with cigarettes (there wouldn’t be time, anyway) or to smoke two cigarettes at once. It was more that he felt the desire to smoke a cigarette even when he was smoking a cigarette. The need was and wasn’t being met… While it would always be true and fair to say that Richard felt like a cigarette, it would now be doubly true and fair to say it. He felt like a cigarette. And he felt like a cig

Kishore Kumar, Yodel-ay-ee-oooo Songs, A List

*Updated with corrections pointed out by Bart Plantenga , author of some incredible book on Yodeling including Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World. -0- Kishore Kumar 's brother Anoop Kumar, who we basically know for the line ' O manu tera toh hua ab mera kya hoga ', used to own lots of Austrian music records. And from these records, Kishore Kumar picked up the art of Yodel singing, an art perfected in bathroom and then introduced by him to the world of Hindi film music. According to his biography 'Kishore Kumar: method in madness‎ ' by Derek Bose, "Kishore was a fan of the Swiss singer Tex Norton [* Tex Morton, an Australian cowboy born in New Zealand who sang  in the gene autry / Jimmie Rodgers style ] and the Australian Jimmy Rogers [* Jimmie Rodgers , perhaps the most American and one of the most famous yodelers in the world, famous for his blue yodels ] as well." Although most of these songs by Kishore Kumar are t