A few of my favourite films from the last few months

Not a year-end list or a “best of 2022” or anything such (I haven’t been watching much contemporary cinema anyway; my to-watch list is much longer than my have-watched list) – these are short notes on some films I have particularly enjoyed in recent months.

 

Bhediya

My favourite Hindi film of the ones I watched this year. For a narrative that uses goofy, even scatological humour as one of its chief operating modes (and also opens with a jump-scare horror scene that has a wolf-as-monster leaping at the camera), it is remarkable how caring and thoughtful Bhediya ultimately is in its view of the natural world. But lest you should think I liked it so much only because of the ecological “message” (or the dog-love), I should clarify that my least favourite part of the film was its final 30-45 minutes when it became a little pedantic on that front. That said, it was a courageous decision for a massy film like this to almost completely sidestep its human actors – including a big star – in its closing segment and to focus on the wild (or CGI-generated wild). I enjoyed most of its varying tones, from the slapstick to the impressive transformation scene mid-film. 

 

Ponniyin Selvan 1

I have watched PS-1 in both Tamil and Hindi. (Shamefaced confession: the big-screen viewing was in Hindi – the result of being very keen to see it in the hall and not having many options available during a busy fortnight). Going into it, knowing that Mani Ratnam was unlikely to spoon-feed viewers who didn’t know the source material, I read a bit about Kalki Krishnamurthy’s novel and also did a quick refresher course on the Chola dynasty; this turned out to be imperative, otherwise I would – like many other viewers who just drifted into the hall like sheep – have been left confused by the film’s tangle of characters and episodes.

Particularly liked Karthi’s performance as Vandhiyadevan – an author-backed role, of course (it reminds me of the gloriously mischievous Amar Ayyar in the Hamzanama, another “supporting” figure who is essentially the lead), but one that must have been daunting to play given how iconic the character is in modern Tamil literature.

 

Gargi

Probably the clearest case this year of a lead performance defining a film for me: Sai Pallavi is wonderful as the young teacher who tries to defend her father (and family) after a rape charge. So much hinges on Pallavi’s presence, her body language… and the texture of her expressive, despairing voice. (Sympathies to anyone who watched this film in a Hindi-dubbed version and still think they really watched it.)

Though I wasn’t blown away by the narrative arc, I liked the decision not to show the face of the assaulted little girl even though she is a central presence in many scenes. On paper, that seems like the sort of showy virtuousness I don’t much care for in “issue” films, but here it worked on two levels – the non-diegetic one being that it shielded a child actress from having to express the trauma generated by such a brutal attack. 

 

Malayankunju

I enjoy cracking jokes about the ongoing obsession with Fahadh Faasil’s “eye-acting” (especially when it comes from people who have only just discovered Malayalam cinema, turned FF into a poster boy and not paid enough attention to the equally good actors elsewhere) – but I thought he was very good in this film as an embittered, bad-tempered loner who becomes trapped under his house after a landslide. The sound design after the main action begins is excellent too, and made me wish I had watched the film in a theatre. 

 

Monica O My Darling

A film that is first and foremost for cinephilia-enthusiasts (and not so much for viewers who fixate on “original content” and dislike “self-indulgent” movies that are full of meta-references) – but that said, Monica O My Darling worked for me as a stand-alone too, and I didn’t spent much time counting the Easter eggs in it: an engaging enough plot, wonderful use of music, some decent twists and detours, and fine performances, especially by Sikander Kher, Huma Qureshi, and Sukant Goel (who reminds me a bit of Deepak Dobriyal).

 

Vikram

Terrific, unapologetically stylish action film. I don’t think any of its three great stars (Kamal Haasan, Vijay Sethupathi, Fahadh) was utilised in the best possible way, which is perhaps inevitable when screen time has to be divided. (I loved the swag, and the use of music, in Sethupathi’s first appearance, though.) But it all came together very well, with some solid setpieces – notwithstanding some slackness in the last stretch.

 

The Banshees of Inisherin

In Bruges is still my favourite Martin McDonagh film (and definitely the funniest – in a nasty, bleak, “hey, here’s a joke about pedophilia, and another about dwarfism” way), but his latest – the story of a friendship coming to an end on an Irish isle in 1923 – is wonderful too. The Banshees of Inisherin becomes more and more engrossing, its stakes rising continuously, even as it becomes clear that McDonagh isn’t aiming for a clear-cut plot resolution. 

 

The Wonder

Another atmospheric period film set in Ireland (in 1862) – and like The Banshees of Inisherin, this one also has a climactic sequence where a solitary house is set on fire against a beautifully desolate landscape. Thematically, though, the narrative – adapted from an Emma Donoghue novel about a young girl, from a very religious family, who has stopped eating altogether – is closer to Satyajit Ray’s Devi and perhaps even Carl Dreyer’s Ordet.

 

(To be continued. I have also written elsewhere about some of my other favourites from this year, such as X, Pearl, Rk/RKay, Sharmaji Namkeen and others)

A few thoughts on RRR and the international awards

(I don’t like writing “topical” pieces – such as editorial comments in immediate response to something that has just happened – but I did this oped for the Economic Times)
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If ever asked “Does this film deserve to win at the Golden Globes/Oscars/New York Film Critics Circle?”, I intone the boring, non-committal reply I have to any such question about competitive awards in the arts: “Well, I liked it. (Or, Well, I didn’t much like it.) But it depends on the mood the jury is in, or the type of film they feel like showcasing this year.”

So that’s the wet-blanket response. But there have been much more impassioned, strongly articulated views about the recent international plaudits for SS Rajamouli’s quasi-historical fantasy RRR (the latest being two Golden Globe nominations, which have raised expectations for some recognition at the Oscars, even if the film isn’t India’s official submission there). Broadly, there are two polarised reactions. One is unabashed celebration, bordering on jingoistic fervour. This often comes from the sort of people who hail Rishi Sunak as “mitti da puttar” and who knew nothing about south Indian cinema prior to watching Rajamouli’s grand epics, but now see RRR’s success as something that should collectively! make India! proud! There is also the excitement that such recognition should come for a muscular masala movie with action and musical setpieces and overt patriotism, rather than one of those understated, meaningful-silence-ridden festival films that critics get excited about.

In the opposite corner there has been teeth-gnashing about the supposed stereotyping of Indian cinema in the West, with all this attention given to a showy, larger-than-life aesthetic that some feel we should have “outgrown” long ago. Those who never cared for big-budget masala cinema, or at least didn’t think it worthy of international prizes, have rallied against RRR’s success, aghast at the idea that this might be the first Indian film to win an award that even Satyajit Ray didn’t. (A pointless gripe. Three years ago Parasite won a best picture Oscar that giants like Renoir or Kurosawa or Bergman never came close to winning. That’s just the nature of the award circus, and how it changes over time.) They also sulk that all those Americans must have got over-excited because the film was culturally exotic; that they would never have celebrated a Hollywood Marvel film in this way. (This conveniently ignores the fact that everything we think we know about the products we consume from other cultures comes through similar distorting prisms; and given the diversity in this country, this would be equally true for a Bengali watching a Malayali film, or a Bihari watching a Tamil film.)

Each of these views is extreme and one-dimensional in its own way, but each – assuming it is truthful – deserves consideration too. I have no patience with the sniffy notion that only realistic, grounded cinema deserves prestigious awards, but if someone honestly believes that RRR is a shallow or uneven film it’s silly to expect them to get behind it only because this is a “matter of pride for the country” or some such saphead reason. Why should, say, a Malayali director of low-key, personal cinema, always struggling for funds and marketing, be excited about a ₹550 crore blockbuster getting international acclaim and even more mileage?

With its hyper-dramatic tone and a fictionalised narrative built around two real-life revolutionaries who had opposed the British Raj, RRR is a grandly ambitious exercise in escapist wish-fulfilment, a function that cinema has served since its very beginnings, since the first fantasies constructed by Georges Melies 125 years ago, or the 1901 film where a man approaches an intrusive camera and swallows it. Personally I liked Rajamouli’s epic a great deal, with a couple of reservations – including mixed reactions to the big setpieces (though I was stirred and thrilled by the dance-as-revolutionary-uprising “Naatu Naatu” sequence, I wasn’t blown away by the celebrated scene where CGI animals are let loose on a dinner party). But of course, this is a very individual, variable response that was dependent, as any viewing experience is, on many tangible and intangible factors working independently of how “good” or “bad” a film is. Such as: watching in a hall with equally responsive company; being prepared for a brassy, larger-than-life experience (as opposed to settling down to watch a quiet, understated film alone at home).

Competitive awards are equally chimerical beasts, changing colour and shape according to a number of intersecting conditions: there is no telling what might work from one year to the next; for every learned-sounding proclamation that someone might make about what type of film wins Oscars, it’s easy to pull out the history sheets and offer a counterpoint. Ultimately the least useful way to think about a film’s award prospects is to theorise and bloviate about the larger picture. If RRR does collect a big one in the coming months, I won’t be thinking about what this might mean for “Indian cinema” (as if any such monolithic entity exists), or whether it signals global endorsement of the Hindutva nationalism supposedly endorsed by the film. I’ll be thinking, as a movie-nerd, of the ways in which certain films can fuel our fantasies. And how, watching NT Rama Rao Jr leap lithely about on screen, was to be pleasingly reminded of his legendary grandfather’s swag in 1950s films like Paatal Bhairavi. From that perspective, it felt like this film was a homage to an Indian movie of an earlier age that few Western critics or award shows would have even known about, much less deemed worthy of taking a second look at.

[Also see this piece about the Parasite win at the Oscars in 2020]

My contribution to Sight and Sound’s greatest films poll

One of the more exciting things to happen recently is that I got to contribute to the latest Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll. (The poll has been conducted every decade since 1952 – more information about it here. And here are the latest results.) Even for someone who is list-agnostic, this was a fun exercise – and the first step in the enjoyment is to accept that list-making of this sort is a child’s game. Even a “500 favourite films” list couldn’t possibly be final or representative, but selecting only 10 films is a cosmic joke, especially when there are so many varied cinematic forms and cultures, from mainstream and “art” Hindi cinema to “world cinema” to old Hollywood to the Malayalam new wave etc etc. As I wrote in my note accompanying the poll (see below), the list would be very different if I made it an hour later, or in a slightly different mood, or…

Anyway, here are my submissions along with the brief note I sent about each film, and a more general summary where I cheekily listed an additional 40-odd films that I would have loved to include (even that extended list is very basic, and uses the one-director-one-film rule). Do go through it if you feel like, and get back with shouts of indignation, or even approval.

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Sherlock Jr
Year: 1924
Director(s): Buster Keaton
Comment: For its prescient understanding of our relationship with the movies we watch; for the breath-taking gags and stunts; and for Buster the actor, so beautiful and expressive even at his most deadpan.

A Matter of Life and Death
Year: 1946
Director(s): Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger
Comment: For how skilfully the entire cosmos, and everything that is important or worth arguing about, is brought down to the dimensions of a small makeshift operating theatre where life and love are at stake. For Powell-Pressburger doing beautiful things with colour AND black-and-white (which is one reason why I included this instead of one of their other 1940s masterpieces). For the set design and Allan Gray’s haunting score and the young Richard Attenborough saying “It’s Heaven… isn’t it.”

Psycho
Year: 1960
Director(s): Alfred Hitchcock
Comment: The film that set me on the path to reading about cinema, thinking about it in ways I had never done before, understanding what “pure film” might mean. Part nasty comedy, part profound tragedy – and yes, of course it was ground-breaking for the horror genre too. The first half, anchored by Janet Leigh's superb performance and culminating in the parlour conversation between Norman Bates and Marion Crane, is magic. 

Mayabazar
Year: 1957
Director(s): Kadiri Venkata Reddy
Comment: As a north Indian, I came to this classic quite late – but it has long had legendary status in south India, and for good reason. It takes a regional side-story from the great Indian epic Mahabharata and weaves from it a joyous musical-fantasy-drawing room comedy about the mischievous god Krishna teaming up with a demon prince to help ill-fated lovers. The mythological and the quotidian effortlessly come together here. 

Sholay
Year: 1975
Director(s): Ramesh Sippy
Comment: This immortal “curry western” – much more sophisticated in execution than most other mainstream Hindi films of its time – borrows many elements from international films but harnesses them superbly. A pop-cultural touchstone for generations of Indian viewers. Impossible to convey how much this film meant to Hindi-movie-buffs of my age. 

PlayTime
Year: 1967
Director(s): Jacques Tati
Comment: For a long time, I admired PlayTime – as one of the most ambitious and meticulously constructed films ever made – but had also formed a memory of it as a deliberately cool, calculating work that was hard to take to one’s heart. Watching it again recently, I found a much warmer film than I’d remembered, and was moved by the not-quite-romance between the awkward Hulot and the sweet American tourist, passing each other like ships on a chaotic night. 

Ee.Ma.Yau.
Year: 2018
Director(s): Lijo Jose Pellissery
Comment: Death as comedy and tragedy in this marvelously structured and performed film by a leading director of the Malayalam film industry – arguably India’s most exciting movie-making centre at the present time. I haven’t seen many other films that manage to be so funny, dignified and mournful at the same time, often achieving all these things within the same scene (depending on which part of the crowded frame you are looking at).

Early Summer
Year: 1951
Director(s): Yasujiro Ozu
Comment: Perhaps the least seen of the three films in Ozu's "Noriko trilogy", but my personal favourite. This depiction of a large family hoping to get the daughter, Noriko, married (she is 28, past the right age!) reminds me in some ways of similar equations in the typical Indian joint family – but this is very much a work rooted in Japanese culture, and very much an Ozu film that employs his spare aesthetic and his gentle, knowing gaze. With the great Setsuko Hara in one of her finest roles.

Monsoon Wedding
Year: 2001
Director(s): Mira Nair
Comment: Like Early Summer, this is about a large joint family and wedding preparations - but the tone here is often as rambunctious as the loudest Punjabi ceremonies and celebrations; at other times it is deathly still in its chronicling of buried tensions and its awareness of the class divide. One of my most cherished ensemble movies. 

Hi, Mom!
Year: 1970
Director(s): Brian De Palma
Comment: A funny, savagely political work by my favourite of the 1970s American filmmakers. With the young De Niro in a role that in some ways points the way to Travis Bickle, but ALSO gives him a chance to play a nebbish Woody Allen type preparing for anarchist violence. Then there is "Be Black, Baby", the grainy, black-and-white film within this film, a kick in the solar plexus to wannabe liberals who want to support the underprivileged, but with minimum discomfort to themselves.

My further remarks
The usual caveats apply: there is no way a 10-film list could even pretend to be representative; I could list a different set of films an hour later, and then again the hour after that, and so on. Also, that I could find no place in this submission for some of my very favourite movies, directors or performers, and will experience deep regret about this or that exclusion the very second after I press “Submit”.

At a culture-specific level, I’d like to add this: as an Indian who grew up experiencing Hollywood and “world cinema” while also being surrounded by the many Indian cinemas (representing our cultures, storytelling forms and approaches, many of which I am still discovering), I could easily fill a list of 100 favourite films with just Indian titles and have plenty left over. That’s just to explain how hard this task is.

So, having got that out of the way: what is common to these 10 selections is that they all mean a great deal to me – a few of them I first watched as a child or adolescent, others I came to much more recently; but each of them has, in some way or the other, haunted my dreams and my waking life, while broadening my understanding of the medium and its many uses.

A few of them can be described as “canonical” (Sherlock Jr, Psycho and PlayTime in particular) – but that is a matter of secondary importance where I’m concerned. (Of course, what is canonical is also subjective. For Indians, Sholay – still arguably the most successful and popular mainstream Hindi film ever made – is a groaningly obvious choice for a list like this, and I toyed with the possibility of replacing it with a more recent epic such as Anurag Kashyap’s superb two-part Gangs of Wasseypur; but eventually I went with the film that had the bigger impact on me as a movie buff.)

Similarly, the fact that there are only two 21st century titles in the list (both Indian films set in very different milieus, but each in its way about family and community, masks and social rituals) doesn’t mean that there aren’t dozens of films made in the 2000s that I love just as much; all it means is that there wasn’t enough space.

With deep apologies to hundreds of other films - but the ones I am most cut up about leaving out as I type this include: Pushpaka Vimana (1987), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), Mr India (1987), Mr Sampat (1952), Yojimbo (1961), Sullivan's Travels (1941), Eyes Without a Face (1960), The Seventh Victim (1943), Le Mepris (1963), Children of the Paradise (1945), Gun Crazy (1949), Sunset Boulevard (1950), A Trip to the Moon (1903), The Curse of the Cat People (1944), Winter Light (1963), Bringing up Baby (1938), Touch of Evil (1958), Bhavni Bhavai (1980), Party (1984), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931), Harakiri (1962), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), A Canterbury Tale (1944), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1967), The Gold Rush (1925), Honey I Shrunk the Kids (1989), Pulp Fiction (1994), Onibaba (1964), Biwi aur Makaan (1966), Haxan (1922), Maqbool (2003), Die Nibelungen (1924), Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008), Man With a Movie Camera (1929), My Darling Clementine (1946), Where is the Friend’s House? (1987), Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), Spartacus (1960), Charandas Chor (1975), The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), and There Will Be Blood (2007).

Why did my Friend Cry? On vulnerable child actors and ‘humanist’ directors

(my latest Economic Times column)
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One of my personal rewards teaching film history over the past few weeks has been a reacquaintance with Charles Chaplin. Like many contemporary fans of silent comedy, I usually think of myself as a Buster Keaton fan first – centred on the breath-taking stunts, the inventive use of visual space, and the deadpan, unsentimental persona that makes Keaton seem so much more “modern” than Chaplin. But this comparison can be unfair to both great clowns. To watch films like The Circus or The Gold Rush again, in excellent prints and on a large-sized screen, is to be reminded of what a giant Chaplin was as actor and filmmaker. The distinctive mixing of emotion and slapstick in works like City Lights also shows why he had such a deep influence on Indian cinema, from Raj Kapoor to Kamal Haasan to Sridevi and others channelling the Tramp; or Kundan Shah in his 1976 diploma film Bonga using the music from the gibberish-song scene in Modern Times.

After a recent class screening of the 1921 The Kid for 18-year-old students – all accustomed to a very different cinematic idiom, but responsive to this film – we had a writing and discussion exercise where words like “humanity” and “compassion” repeatedly came up. The scene where the Tramp is forcibly separated from the orphaned boy he has raised drew many such reactions, with students noting the powerful depiction of the father-child bond in maternal terms, and the respect given to non-biological parenthood.

And yet, watching that very scene, I felt uneasy about the sight of the six-year-old Jackie Coogan bawling his heart out.

In Chaplin’s memoir, he tells the story of how Coogan’s real-life father made him cry for the scene by telling the child he would be taken away from the studio. Chaplin adds a coda to make it seem like Coogan knew all along what his dad was up to, but one wonders. Superb little actor as the “kid” was, was he so good as to fake that crying? At any rate, how easy it must have been to manipulate someone that age.

It put me in mind of another scene and back-story – from another deeply moving film made six decades later, Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s House? In the final sequence a little boy, looking scared, weeps quietly in class because he thinks the teacher will find him without his notebook. The story ends happily – it is what the whole film has built towards. But the director’s method for getting the child actor Ahmed Ahmadpour to really cry was to place a photo in his book and tell him the teacher would be very angry if he found it.

I mention these examples because these are moving, life-affirming films, and their directors are often described as “humanist”. There is good reason for such labels to be applied to filmmakers like Kiarostami or Chaplin, but one sees how even a sensitive, kindly director might be put into the position of making a child cry for his art.

Of course, there are degrees and degrees when it comes to such things. It’s hard to argue that the cases above are comparable with the sustained, vitality-sapping exploitation that many vulnerable young performers – think Judy Garland – faced at the hands of studios and producers. In India, which prides itself on family values, there are film-industry horror stories – including from an era that many people naively label more genteel and civilised – about adolescent girls made to “grow up” too soon so they can be money-minters. Remember how shocked everyone was when Daisy Irani disclosed that she was raped by a guardian when she was a child actor in the 1950s, and that her mother “padded her up with a sponge” at 15 and left her alone with a producer.

Perhaps, in a world where stories are constructed for others to be immersed in, and where little people have to pretend for the camera, “humanist” can only be a relative term. I used to be annoyed by those formulaic Hindi-film scenes where a child actor wept unconvincingly (enunciating “waain waain waain” the same way they might say “woof” if asked to play dog), but on reflection that artificiality feels kinder. Even if it was merely the case that those directors – unlike Chaplin and Kiarostami – didn’t take the child seriously enough to try and wrench a Method-level performance out of him.

'Morality' in horror: how I learnt to stop worrying and love the sanskaari, chainsaw-wielding monster

Uday Bhatia wolfishly asked me to write a horror-related essay as an adjunct to this week’s Mint Lounge cover by Rituparna Sengupta. It was a tight deadline (plus I watched Bhediya in between, liked it a lot, and got confused about whether I should include one of the many talking points around that film) – but eventually I wrote something about one of horror’s pet themes, the often passive-aggressive dance between tradition and modernity. (Also touched on this in my Intro for Shamya Dasgupta’s Ramsay Brothers book.) And how the genre messes with the moral impulse. Here is the piece.
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Mini-horror films – or terrifying moments worthy of a good horror film – can reside within movies that are not, strictly speaking, from the genre. Consider a chilling sequence from the 2019 Malayalam thriller Ishq, about young lovebirds who run afoul of two men posing as policemen. The scene begins with Vasudha (Ann Sheetal) and Sachi (Shane Nigam) in an intensely romantic moment at the back of a car. Both are shy, uncertain, but also eager; he takes the initiative and asks her to kiss him on the cheek – it is the first time they are getting even this physical.

After some hesitation she complies, then asks that they sit together for a while before driving back. The air is thick with unarticulated desire, their lips draw close… and the blinding, invasive light bursts in on them (and on us, since the camera is right behind the lovers). A private space becomes a public one; what follows is creepy and claustrophobic, though there isn’t an actual physical assault.

The scene reminded me of a comparable situation in a very different type of movie – the raunchy Hollywood teen-slashers of the 1970s and 80s, which for many urban Indian kids of my age were introductions to the horror genre at its most base and accessible. This horror – as experienced on creaking video-cassettes – was inextricably linked with sex; it was often our best hope of seeing onscreen nudity without being closely monitored by parents. Here is Halloween with its artful opening sequence through the POV of a child wearing a pumpkin mask, culminating in the murder of a big sister who has been “naughty” with her boyfriend. Here are the Evil Dead and the Friday the 13th franchises, wherein horny teens make out in the woods before being dissected by knife or chainsaw.

For many of us – young boys, at least – the homicidal monster in these movies was bad only because he ended this glorious vision of heaving nude bodies. Other viewers, from an older generation, might agree. One of my favourite writers, Danny Peary, described the traumatic experience of being an adolescent in 1960, watching the shower murder in Hitchcock’s Psycho with no clue about what was to come: it felt like the naked woman was being punished for allowing all these male viewers to look at her, Peary said; the killer’s knife was aimed as much at the lascivious audience. (“I believe one reason we were so terrorised is that we related it to our own mother bursting through an unlocked door and ripping apart a dirty magazine she caught us with.”)

In the Indian 1980s, there were the cheaply made B and C films such as the work of the Ramsay Brothers: skimpily dressed youngsters –unmarried! Of both sexes! – went off together in an imported red convertible but arrived at a very Indian haveli, only to be nastily surprised while showering in swimsuits or wriggling beneath bedsheets. Much later the Pakistani film Zibahkhana (2007) would offer a self-aware look at how such tropes play out in a milieu where teenagers merely doing drugs together could invite hellfire. (“Jahunnum mein jaa rahe ho, mere bachchon!” yells an old man as the young reprobates prance off together. Soon enough, a burqa-clad psychopath arrives.)

Ishq is a more refined and sensitive film, more about critiquing the male gaze than indulging it (this remains true in the second half, when the nominal good guy sets out to take revenge and becomes a monster himself). But the effect of its predatory scenes – as in all the above films – hinges on the fear of being watched, or burst in upon, during a very vulnerable moment. And from a strictly conservative point of view, the predator in all these cases is simply being moral – or “moral” in quote marks, if you prefer.

Throughout horror-movie history, there have been many manifestations of this “moral” monster. The surgeon in the French classic Eyes Without a Face is a loving father who wants the best new face for his disfigured girl. The busboy in Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood yearns to be an acclaimed artist (and perhaps this means making clay statues with real people underneath). Leatherface and his family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are social outcastes who need to eat (and they sit together at the table like a good sanskaari clan). Mrs Bates doesn’t want her boy despoiled by city women. Looked at in the proper way, these are all reasonable justifications for murder.

Closely related to this is one of horror’s most enduring themes: the uneasy dance between tradition and progress, past and present, old and young; how an archaic or fading world threatens a modernizing one, or vice versa; how family or community values come up against individuality. The treatment of this theme varies, though, and different films pick different sides, or leave things open to interpretation. On one hand, there are plenty of stories where youngsters are gratuitously slaughtered for defying social strictures. On the other hand, there are films about strong, outspoken or desirous women who are presented in sympathetic terms – from Irena in Cat People (1942), the disturbed heroine trying to shrug off an ancestral shadow and lead a happy life (but the beast inside her is unleashed when she is sexually aroused) to, in a more explicitly Woke age, the protagonists of recent Hindi films: such as Phobia (2016) in which a once-free-living artist is confined to an apartment, made dependent, because of a psychological trauma; Aatma (2013), in which a man exercises supernatural power over his glamorous ex-wife because he can’t control her in the usual ways; or Ek thi Daayan (2013), in which another man struggles with a romantic relationship, because who can say when a woman might turn into a witch?

So the monsters can be conservative moral policers who would take away the agency of young people or keep status quos in place. But equally, the monsters can be youngsters whose self-centred hedonism comes at the expense of others. (When those philandering kids in the Ramsays’ Purana Mandir condescend on “junglee” tribals, you almost sympathise with the pre-modern demon Samri who arrives to show them what’s what.) And in this light it’s worth noting what happens when the parameters shift from the terrible things that humans do to each other (across the lines of gender, class, caste, ethnicity, religion or what have you) to the even more ghastly things that our species has collectively done to other animals and to the environment.

When that becomes the focus, all of us are in some way implicated, and this unpleasant truth is captured in ecological horror/creature films like the recent Aavasavyuham: The Arbit Documentation of An Amphibian Hunt, which uses a mockumentary-like format to tell the story of a strange man who enters and exits the lives of various groups of people in the Kerala backwaters. It is also a subtext in Tumbbad (2018) – one of our most elegant supernatural films – which uses as an epigraph the Gandhi quote about the earth having enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed.

In the fine new horror-comedy Bhediya – a werewolf story that is mindful of the unfairly bad press given to wolves in folklore and fables – a young man goes into the Arunachal jungles for a profit-minded corporation, unconcerned about the natural world and our responsibilities to it. (“The only hariyali I know is hara patta – cash.”) When older people firmly resist a road being built through their forest, these mercenaries turn to youth leaders, seducing them with the promise of malls and multiplexes. (“The jungle has made you frogs in a well. Conservation ke naam pe kab tak junglee bane rahoge?”)

But then the protagonist gets in touch with his inner wolf, gets a guided tour through the wild, and starts to appreciate its importance. The lines between good/bad tradition and good/bad modernity are blurred, as is the very meaning of “progress”. And the bhediya becomes the best kind of moral monster, chomping on a few people now and again, but always with an eye on the greater good.