While other people binge-watch 21st-century things on Netflix etc, I have been on a mini-marathon of Universal horror films from the 1930s and early 40s, especially the ones that brought Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff together on screen (after their successes as Dracula and the Frankenstein monster respectively): the best of these casting coups include the 1934 The Black Cat and the 1935 The Raven, both titled for Edgar Allan Poe stories but having almost nothing to do with the source material.
Conventional wisdom says that Karloff was the better actor of the two — more malleable, elegant, capable of playing “straight” roles — and that Lugosi could only do camp or caricature (partly because he spoke with a thick Hungarian accent, his English was poor, and his features limited him to stereotypical roles). You can see the reasoning behind that argument when watching scenes like the one in The Raven where a bearded Karloff (as a convict on the run) demands that Dr Vollin (Lugosi) give him a new face through plastic surgery: there is something poignant about Karloff’s desperation here, he plays the scene as if he were in a “realistic” dramatic film of the time, and does it very well — while Lugosi is leering and rolling his eyes like he never wants to exit the torture chambers and coffins in the Universal lot.
But I think Lugosi was a personality-actor who could be very powerful and effective within his limited range. He has a surprising sense of humour, for instance, a facility for delivering blackly funny lines, or just for showing exasperation at the naive squares he is surrounded by. (Some of his scenes remind me of another deadpan Central European, Ivan Lendl, telling an umpire, after getting a series of bad calls: “What are you going to tell me next, my house is on fire?”) And he can be unexpectedly moving too, in scenes like the one in The Black Cat where his character learns that his wife and daughter are dead (the former kept preserved in a glass case by a mad architect — but that’s another story).
Anyway, here are some stills from The Black Cat and The Raven featuring these two legends, locked together in posterity. As the Karloff character Poelzig says in one of the finest scenes from that film, an unusual subjective-camera movement through the basement of his Art Deco house, “You say your soul was killed and that you have been dead all these years. And what of me? Did we not both die here in Marmorus fifteen years ago? Are we any the less victims of the war than those whose bodies were torn asunder? Are we not both the living dead?”
[The dystopian horror film Ghoul, produced by Vikramaditya Motwane and Phantom, released on Netflix today as a three-part web series. I watched a preview screening last night and was – to my surprise – blown away by a lot of the film, especially the final 20-25 minutes. Here’s a piece I wrote for Daily O. No major spoilers]
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There is a brilliantly suspenseful sequence – hinging on an evil double – in the horror film Ghoul, just out on Netflix as a three-episode mini-series. Without giving away major spoilers, the scene has two manifestations of a particular character, one of whom we know to be the real person and the other a ghul (an ancient, malevolent spirit) who has taken on this physical form. These “twins” behave identically, each is seen in the company of other people who are imperiled, the film cross-cuts rapidly between them, and we have no way of knowing where the true threat lies.
As the sequence unfolded, all of us in the crowded hall vacillated every few seconds; people in nearby seats whispered nervously “Yeh ghul hai, woh asli hai… nahin nahin YEH ghul hai”. It was a classic demonstration of audience manipulation. Even as a long-time horror and suspense buff, who doesn’t get easily spooked, I was captivated.
But thinking about it later, this scene is also apt given the ambiguous (or to use a word with a double meaning, duplicitous) nature of the Ghoul narrative – where we are led to first believe that the horror stands for one thing, then realise that it was about something else.
As any student of the genre knows, some of the most famous horror motifs in literature and cinema have been responses to the real-world concerns or paranoias of the period in question – from Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein in the wake of the 18th century Vitalism debates about the nature of life, to the disfigurement and deformity themes in films and art of the 1920s (a few years after the mass-scale brutalizing of human bodies during the First World War), and so much else in between.
In that context, given the basic story of Ghoul, it is natural to think that the horror in the film represents terrorism in an exaggerated supernatural form. The story begins with the capture of a terrorist leader named Ali Saeed (Mahesh Balraj), and there is some nudge-wink wordplay about this man being a “monster”. The film’s protagonist Nida (Radhika Apte) is one of the military interrogators at a dingy detention centre who must break this dreaded prisoner. Instead, they soon find themselves dealing with something much more fearsome than they had imagined. Midway through, when Ali Saeed (or the ghoul possessing him) starts psychologically manipulating his captors, turning them against each other, it felt like a version of terrorist leaders “brainwashing” their followers and co-opting them to a murderous cause.
But as the narrative progresses, a subtle shift occurs and Ghoul reveals itself to be a sharply subversive film about other concurrent real-world threats: the threats of jingoism, hyper-nationalism and sectarianism, which we in contemporary India are starting to know a great deal about. This is a story very much of a time and place where minorities of various stripes can be judged without a trial, where criticism of a ruling party is conflated with disrespecting the country, where writers can be attacked and murdered in public, or made to feel like traitors if they don’t subscribe to “Us” vs “Them” polarities built around the cosmic accident of being born in this religion rather than that (or on this geographical territory opposed to that one).
In a way, we have been prepared for this by the film’s early scenes, which show us – in a dystopian but recognizable India of the near future – a conflict of views between Nida and her father. He is a conscientious professor, worried about what is going on in the country, and is teaching his students to question everything; while she has aligned herself with the state and strongly disapproves of anything that might be perceived as anti-national, even children’s nursery rhymes. Shortly after this, the main narrative begins, and in the context of what happens in the detention centre, Nida comes across as a sympathetic, diligent figure – but our ambivalent attitude to her is still very much in place. And like many other characters in other horror stories, the events that follow will force her to look long and hard into the mirror – at her twin “ghul” that might be lurking there.
This is not to say that the film ever goes soft on terrorism (or on Islamist terrorism) –nothing as simple as that. Ali Saeed and most of the other prisoners in the detention centre are criminals who were responsible for the deaths of innocent figures. (There is also one prisoner named Ahmed who wasn’t a terrorist at all but was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and ended up incarcerated possibly because of his religion.) But the film does playfully raise the possibility that if, in an earlier cinematic idiom we had vigilante heroes like the Angry Young Man to fight injustice, today we might need to call on supernatural forces to protect us from bullying and bigotry.
There is a weary cliché, indulged in by people who don’t really understand or care for the genre, that so-and-so film “isn’t simply a horror movie, it is more than that”. As a horror fan, I don’t care for such patronizing language, but I can – just about – forgive someone applying it to the ending of Ghoul. Its final shot (again, no big spoiler), where a character sets out to launch vengeance on an authoritarian state, has the swift, savage directness of a good propaganda film. And yet it comes on the heels of a mostly well-paced story that also works as a genre piece.
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Viewing tip: I watched Ghoul on a big screen, in a dark hall, as a two-hour-long feature film (which is how it was conceived, before being broken up into a mini-series). Needless to say, anyone watching an atmospheric film like this on a laptop screen should try to stay similarly distraction-free – otherwise much of the impact will be lost.
[This is the intro I wrote for my friend Shamya Dasgupta’s book Don't Disturb the Dead, about the Ramsay Brothers. Excerpts from the book are here and here]
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Cinema has been a running theme in my relationship with Shamya Dasgupta, ever since we found ourselves doing a post-grad communication course together in 1998. The first time I really paid attention to him was when he mentioned that my poker-face reminded him of Buster Keaton; I had long given up on ever meeting anyone who knew such esoteric names, or shared my interest in old, non-Indian films.
In a class of thirty-five students, Shamya and I were the only ones already on first-name terms with Citizen Kane and Aguirre and A Short Film about Killing, and we sneered superiorly when the others – most of whom were priming for a career in marketing or advertising – looked foxed by the “classics” shown in our (much-too-infrequent) Cinema Studies classes. Back then, if a time traveler had told me that nearly two decades later I would be writing an introduction for a cinema book authored by Shamya, I would have been elated.
I’m not sure, though, how either of us would have felt if told the book would be about the Ramsay Brothers.
While I loved horror films even back then, at age 21 I still mainly thought of them as a guilty pleasure, not as something that was part of the Good Cinema canon. (Caveat: Hitchcock’s Psycho was, then as now, one of the key films in my life, but I didn’t classify it as “horror film”; I thought of it as equal parts a brilliant black comedy and a Greek tragedy-level story about loneliness and private traps.) As a child, my horror-love had begun with B-movies, including the slasher franchises of the 1980s (House, Demons, The Evil Dead, Friday the 13th). Later, the jaal spread to many subgenres, from Dario Argento’s stylized gore-fests (Suspiria) to David Cronenberg’s gruesome excursions into the human body (Shivers, The Brood) to psychological horror like Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf, and films that somehow combined the above modes, like Georges Franju’s magnificent Eyes Without a Face.
However, for one reason or another, this net never extended to the Ramsay brand. So I won’t pretend to be any sort of expert on their films (feel free to disregard anything I say about their work that sounds informed or educative – you have the rest of this book for that). But I’d like to touch on a point about the genre they worked so passionately in: horror, even B- and C-grade horror, has always had subtexts that, if handled with even basic competence, can tell us very interesting things about a society, its people, the prejudices and paranoias acting upon them.
David Skal’s book The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror is an excellent start if you want food for thought on how horror movies (as well as TV shows, short stories, and comic books in the genre) have reflected, or distorted, a zeitgeist. Writing mainly in an American context, Skal examines how burning real-world topics insinuated their way into the genre: how, for instance, the birth deformities that resulted from the prescription of the drug Thalidomide to pregnant women in the 1960s also birthed a spate of literature and films about monstrous babies and children; or the 
effect that the savaging of human bodies during the two world wars had on films about misshapen “freaks” – as Skal observes, horror’s major subtext during this period was unintentionally revealed in a scene in Abel Gance’s anti-war film J’Accuse, where the ghoulish war dead (played by actual soldiers who had been disfigured) return to haunt the living.
It’s been a while since I read Skal’s book and I don’t remember if he explicitly touched on this (probably not), but one theme that I have personally always been stimulated by in horror and fantasy is that of the past and the present – or tradition and progress – in uneasy conflict, circling each other warily. How an archaic or fading world casts its shadow over a modernizing one; and how the modernizing world hits back, compromises, or capitulates.
This is a theme that stretches well beyond these genres, of course – it has driven many “respectable” classics of world cinema, from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar to Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard. And there are tantalizing intersections: Abrar Alvi and Guru Dutt’s’s 1964 Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam is among the most esteemed Hindi films of its time, an elegant, mournful story about zamindari decadence and doomed love, but its last scene – where the skeletal arm of the film’s beloved but long-forgotten Chhoti Bahu is unearthed years after her death, in an unmarked grave – could have been in a B-horror film.
Within official horror, though, the theme has special resonance, and this long predates cinema. Look at the great 19th-century novels – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Bram Stoker’s Dracula – that would so influence filmic horror in the century to follow. All of them, to some degree, deal with this apparent paradox: modern, scientific methods, for all the good they do, may also open a portal to our most primitive impulses; can we deal with the results, find a way to balance the good with the bad? And these thoughts are hardly surprising when you look at what history tells us about the links between advancement and barbarism: how the development of medicine, for instance, has involved using unprivileged and voiceless people (not to mention animals) as guinea pigs for centuries.
Variants on the tradition-vs-progress theme occur frequently in horror films, and it isn’t always clear which side the film is on. That family of cannibalistic monsters in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre … they are the scary predators and we shudder for their teenage quarries; yet the monsters are also a close-knit family who dine and squabble together and have clearly defined roles within the household, while their victims are scattered trophies of an alienated new world, ripe for being picked off one by one because they rarely work together as a group.
Or take the broad plot summaries of two of cinema’s most iconic ventures into horror/fantasy. In one film, a species not long evolved from simians uses its complex brain to develop technology that can make images move; they call it “cinema”. Travelling to a remote island for a shoot, a movie crew disturbs the peace of a giant ape, captures him and brings him as a showpiece to the most modern of their cities, where he will end his life climbing atop the world’s tallest building and fending off fighter planes (and he will do it all in the service of that most primitive and lethal of emotions, love). There’s King Kong. In the other film, the same species uses its amazing brain to build an atom bomb – a weapon that can do something as “sophisticated” as kill millions of people at a go – but in the process awakens (or creates) a prehistoric monster that then stomps its scaly feet all over a sleek city, so that formal-suited office-goers accustomed to heading about their lives with brisk, mechanical efficiency are turned into screeching victims, uncertain of the very ground they stand on. There’s Godzilla.
Perhaps this theme gets a special urgency in ancient societies that are undergoing change, and need to express their discomfort with the results. In the Pakistani gore film Zibahkhana, a Dracula-like tea-stall owner hollers “Jahannum mein jaa rahe ho, mere bachchon!” (“You’re on the path to hell, children!”) at fun-seeking youngsters; not long after this, a psychopath in a burqa comes after these jeans-clad deviants, whirling a ball-and-chain. See any undercurrents there? And Japanese literature and cinema is chockfull of stories that draw on the nation’s tumultuous relationship with its militant past. In Haruki Murakami’s novel Dance Dance Dance, the narrator discovers that history is alive in a hidden corner of a gleaming, 26-storey, glass-and-steel hotel. A weary creature called the Sheep Man – a gatekeeper to a lost age? – tells him, "Everything's getting more complicated. Everything's speeding up.”
(Does that sound anything like the Ramsay Brothers’ 1981 film Hotel? You decide.)
In the Indian context, one of my all-time favourite Hindi films is Raj Kumar Kohli’s 1979 multi-starrer Jaani Dushman, a film the Ramsays may well have made if they had had large budgets and big-name actors queuing up at their door. On one level, this story about a monster that abducts and kills a village’s brides while they are in the doli en route to their husband’s house can be seen as a parable about a conservative society’s fear that its young women may become bold enough to choose their own grooms. (All of the major women characters – played by Reena Roy, Neetu Singh and Rekha –transgress thus.) But it also works as commentary in a more generalised sense, when you consider that the monster turns out to be the benevolent Thakur played by Sanjeev Kumar (who should have done much more of this sort of hirsute, snarling role, but that’s another subject). In one telling exchange, when Lakhan (Sunil Dutt) asks why the Thakur’s daughter was spared while other brides were not, the old man placidly replies “Hum toh isse kismet ka khel samajhtay hain. Bhaagya ka devta hum pe meherbaan thay, doosron par nahin” – it’s a glib way of sidestepping centuries of exploitation and injustice, and it makes us think again about the fiendish bedrocks of the feudal system. (Do gaz zamindari ke neeche?) In another scene, the Thakur berates his wayward son Shera (Shatrughan Sinha) for “dishonouring” the “izzat” of their family; but ultimately, the city-educated Shera teams up with the other heroes to vanquish this ancient evil.
Today’s Hindi cinema – and Hindi horror cinema – is much sleeker and more self-consciously sophisticated, but since we remain a backward-looking society in so many ways, proud of the best and worst of our cultural heritage (and in many cases the good and the bad are joined at the hip), certain motifs can’t be escaped. See how many major horror films of recent years centre on the idea that a strong, independent woman with a mind of her own can unleash destructive forces in a world that isn’t ready for her. The main plot of Pavan Kripalani’s excellent Phobia begins when Mehak (Radhika Apte) says a gentle “no” to a man, Shaan, who has just 
propositioned her (they have slept together before, he is hoping it might happen again) – this act of exercising choice sets in motion a series of events that make her agoraphobic and dependent on Shaan, who moves her to a new flat (he is not a chauvinist in an overt sense, but the upshot is that she is now safely in a cage, the way many people prefer a woman to be). Then there is Navdeep Singh’s taut NH-10, in which city-bred yuppies Meera (Anushka Sharma) and her husband are adrift in the Haryana hinterland, witnesses to an “honour killing” and stalked by a gang of rough-spoken, homicidal men. NH-10 wasn’t quite labelled “horror film” when it came out, but is structurally very much tied to the genre, and it implicitly deals with the contradictions in a society heaving between old and new ways of life: a society where a woman may have a high-paying job in a posh, gated office complex, but may still be encouraged to carry a weapon for her safety, and to anticipate and be “responsible” for other people’s criminal impulses.
Or take Suparn Verma’s Aatma, which is a lesser film – inert, indifferently performed – than the two mentioned above, but gets a certain frisson from the contrast between the personalities of the urbane Maya and her rough-hewn ex-husband Abhay (as well as the non-diegetic contrast between the actors playing these roles, the tall and glamorous Bipasha Basu and the short-statured, rustic Nawazuddin Siddiqui) – it is possible to read the story as a conflict between a confident upper-class woman and an intimidated man who exercises a new (supernatural) form of masculine power because he can’t control her in the usual ways.
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The Ramsay idiom is, of course, a universe removed from that of these technically polished, sharply shot and tightly edited films, but does anything in their oeuvre fit the old world-new world thesis? Like I said, I’m no expert, but even the four or five films of theirs that I recently watched (or rewatched) have familiar echoes in them.
Early in their first film Do Gaz Zameen ke Neeche, for example, the upright hero rescues a young woman from goons and lets her stay in his house for a night. Dressed in a western outfit at this point, she changes into a saree (but whose?) after they get home and she has to join him for dinner. Meal done, she promptly slinks into a short nightie (but whose?) for bed, and for the seduction scene that follows. The five-minute sequence plays like a condensed version of Manoj Kumar’s Purab aur Paschim or dozens of other films where the woman in a patriarchal society must shift roles, from whore to devi and back in a jiffy, depending on context and time of day. But soon the lines get blurred, and this is where the film’s biggest horrors reveal themselves. In most Hindi films of the time, a woman becomes “good” when she yields to sari and sindoor; in this one, the woman looks nicely domesticated on the surface but continues to be the predatory vamp, taking away her husband’s money, making out with her boyfriend (who is, of all things, pretending to be a family doctor – a desecration of another of the most sacred cows of the time) and plotting murder.
Or watch Pradeep Kumar as a rich man cruising a city’s roads in a fancy, chauffeur-driven car in Purana Mandir, but still haunted by an ancient family curse. See Navin Nischal in Dahshat, a doctor just returned from Russia, very much a confident, professional man of the world, finding that graves are being robbed in the creaky old cemetery in his home town Chandan Nagar. Atavistic impulses, and cries from the distant past, move alongside the monuments we have built to assert our standing as a civilized species. But what does “civilization” mean anyway? A bunch of kids heading off in a red convertible – this in a scene in Purana Mandir in 1984, when even the basic Maruti-800 had just about hit our roads – to live like modern nawabs in a bungalow, while condescending on the “junglee” tribals living nearby? At such times you almost sympathise a little with the demonic Samri as he rolls his eyes and shakes his head ruefully at this strange new world.
Speaking as an amateur viewer, with less than comprehensive knowledge, what else can one say about the Ramsay films? They are derivative, of course, and you’d think the main inspirations would be C-movies, or schlock-gore movies, from other cinematic cultures; or at best, the Hammer Films. But one of the fascinating things about watching them is to see how cinematically well-educated the filmmakers are, and how some very disparate sources seem to be in conversation. This is true of the goofy “filler” moments (e.g. Puneet Issar and Jagdeep playing a version of Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach in a throwaway subplot in Purana Mandir) as well as the paisa-vasool scary scenes. Watching Dahshat, I got a sense of what the impressionist silent-film classic The Cabinet of Dr Caligari might look like if transposed to 1980s rural India and filmed in gaudy colour. Om Shivpuri’s mad scientist Dr Vishal, incongruously dressed in Western evening-wear, bears a physical resemblance – in terms of his portly, slightly hunched physique – to the mountebank Caligari, while Vishal’s mute, grave-digging servant (known only as “goonga”) is strikingly similar to Caligari’s sallow-faced sleepwalker-assistant. Yet this film also has a bit of Island of Dr Moreau in it, as well as Rajendranath’s broad comic style, which could only possibly belong to the Hindi cinema of the period. Talk about versatility.
That the films are creaky, often laughably tacky, is almost a given. But it is also true that horror movies in this register – made on very low budgets, with crude effects, poor lighting and no option of multiple takes – can have a special, visceral impact that is very different from that of more polished, more cerebrally crafted films. The very desperation of the crew, the quick-time solutions found to deal with time and location constraints, become a part of the film’s DNA, making it urgent and otherworldly in ways that may not have been consciously intended. And there are the occasional pleasing moments where execution does match intent. I would venture, for instance, that the opening-credits scene of Dahshat – with the nighttime close-ups of a serpent and an owl, a view of a skeletal arm stretched out on a cart, the slightly canted camera angle – is unsettling even when you watch it on a laptop screen, on YouTube (this should be late at night, though, with the lights in the room turned off: in an age where movie-watching has become such a distracted, casual affair, we must make some concessions!).
In short, these are uneven films, but in their better moments they show a dedication, a purity of purpose, that one sees in “disreputable” cinemas all over the world, the ones where passion and motivation exceed resources or even skill. And in those moments, they certainly can get under your skin. In this book Shamya gives the clan a taste of their own bubbling red medicine, by attempting to get under theirs.
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[Related posts: Phobia, NH-10, Aatma. Here is another long essay about my horror-film love, for the anthology The Popcorn Essayists. And a few other posts about horror films and literature are here]
After watching Haider last week I revisited a couple of earlier versions of Hamlet (Olivier, Branagh), but also happened to spend some time in the company of another fictional nobleman who wears an “inky cloak”. I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula in full for the first time (an embarrassing admission for a long-time horror buff, but there it is) and was unprepared for how masterfully constructed it was: how the pace and energy of the story sweep the reader along, preventing us from thinking too much about the handy plot coincidences; how the many narratives (the book is almost entirely made up of journal entries and letters) complement each other, provide slightly different perspectives on the same events, and dovetail so that we arrive in that comforting place so crucial to the effect of an adventure story about many good guys teaming up against a single powerful evil: oh yes, they’ve finally figured things out, most of the pieces are in place, now they can get on with doing what is required.
There are so many interesting things going on in this book. The shift in voices (this isn’t too pronounced, but once in a while it is done very entertainingly – when Dr Van Helsing is speaking in broken English, or the harbour scene where a garrulous old man blathers on about graves that don’t have the right people in them). The delicious little ways in which the reader is made aware of something that the other characters don’t yet realise the implications of. (A casual line like “She looks paler than usual” can be such a spine-tingler – that's Jonathan Harker, distracted by other things, mentioning his wife Mina in his diary.) The commentary on the social mores of the Victorian age and the scientific developments underway in the late 19th century, and what seemed to me at least a gentle satire on a certain type of self-consciously chivalrous man. (As the male heroes work out their plan to destroy the vampire, they are mindful of Mina’s delicate sensibilities, concerned that she be kept away from the action – not realising that by “sheltering” her thus they are creating more peril all around. Besides, she is actively helping them in important ways. Then there is the fate of the sleepwalking Lucy Westenra, a damsel so much in distress that she has to suffer numerous blood transfusions, the donor in each case being a gallant man – including three men who are in love with her. None of it helps in the end.)
Anyway, reading this book sent me back to some favourite vampire films: Nosferatu, Dreyer's Vampyr, the Lugosi Dracula and Roman Polanski's goofy Fearless Vampire Killers; or, Pardon Me, but Your Teeth are in My Neck. Along the way I noted little connections between Shakespeare’s prince of melancholia and Stoker’s Prince of Darkness. Hamlet’s “dread of something after death – the undiscovered country” is well-known. His father is technically undead, just as any self-respecting vampire would be. And take the scene with the grave-digger, culminating in our hero’s near-dash into the open grave meant for Ophelia: which famous coffin-dweller does that remind you of?
To die, to sleep – no more. Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out. Etc etc. Definite theme here.
There is the joke about a woman who, after reading Hamlet for the first time late in her life, said, “I don't see why people admire that play so much – it is just a bunch of old quotations strung together.” We are meant to scoff at her, but perhaps one should be kinder. Reading merely the first act of the play again, I felt like I was swamped in clichés. (“Neither a borrower nor a lender be”?? Forsooth, Will.) But that’s what happens when a literary work has seeped so thoroughly into popular consciousness and culture, and hundreds of lines that first appeared in it have – through over-use – become trite or ironical.
To a degree, this is also true of Stoker’s novel. After years of movie versions and rip-offs and tributes and parodies, I felt I knew iconic characters like Van Helsing (expert vampire combatant) and the heroic Harkers so well that it came as an atavistic pleasure to meet them in their “original” form. The last time I encountered Mina Harker was as the resourceful but hardened heroine of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, divorced from her husband after their misadventures with the dark Count and having reverted to her maiden name Murray. It took a few chapters of Dracula to shake that image away and start dealing with the compassionate Mina of this book.
Part of me, I think, was expecting something very quaint and dated, with little resemblance to the vampire story as it later became (I’m not talking about Twilight here, by the way – I’m not that up to date). I knew beforehand that the novel’s Count Dracula – initially an old man with a droopy white moustache, later growing more youthful after his blood infusions – was notably different from the debonair, black-cloaked satyr portrayed by Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee. But the book IS full of familiar things, as well as little surprises: I hadn’t realised that the line “Listen to them, the children of the night – what music they make!” so memorably hissed by Lugosi in the 1931 film, was originally from the novel.
Some of my favourite passages feature the lunatic Renfield. For years now I have thought of this character as a caricatured, Igor-like henchman, tottering about Dracula’s castle and grounds, doing his master’s bidding. So the first reference to him - around 75 pages into the book in Dr Seward’s journals - made me sit up. These chapters, where Seward diligently records his patient's “zoophagus” activities, must have delighted the hearts of screenwriters working on Universal horror films.
5 June. The case of Renfield grows more interesting the more I get to understand the man […]
He has turned his mind now to spiders, and has got several very big fellows in a box. He keeps feeding them his flies, and the number of the latter is becoming sensibly diminished, although he has used half his food in attracting more flies from outside to his room.
1 July. His spiders are now becoming as great a nuisance as his flies, and today I told him that he must get rid of them. He looked very sad at this, so I said that he must some of them, at all events. He cheerfully acquiesced in this, and I gave him the same time as before for reduction. He disgusted me much while with him, for when a horrid blowfly, bloated with some carrion food, buzzed into the room, he caught it, held it exultantly for a few moments between his finger and thumb, and before I knew what he was going to do, put it in his mouth and ate it. I scolded him for it, but he argued quietly that it was very good and very wholesome, that it was life, strong life, and gave life to him. This gave me an idea, or the rudiment of one. I must watch how he gets rid of his spiders.
8 July. He has managed to get a sparrow, and has already partially tamed it. His means of taming is simple, for already the spiders have diminished. Those that do remain, however, are well fed, for he still brings in the flies by tempting them with his food.
[…]
My homicidal maniac is of a peculiar kind. I shall have to invent a new classification for him. What he desires is to absorb as many lives as he can, and he has laid himself out to achieve it in a cumulative way. He gave many flies to one spider and many spiders to one bird, and then wanted a cat to eat the many birds. What would have been his later steps?
Macabre as these passages are, they are also very funny in the image they create of the conscientious doctor observing his demented patient and taking notes; the professionalism and scrupulousness of purpose contrasted with the informality of language (“several very big fellows in a box”), and the sense that the author is having some fun in detailing this relationship, the power equations of which are not always clear. How interesting it is that Seward – sane and balanced, but also melancholy because the woman he loves is betrothed to someone else – expresses envy and admiration for Renfield's orderliness:
“How well the man reasoned; lunatics always do within their own scope. I wonder at how many lives he values a man, or if at only one. He has closed the account most accurately, and today begun a new record. How many of us begin a new record with each day of our lives? […] If I only could have as strong a cause as my poor mad friend there, a good, unselfish cause to make me work, that would be indeed happiness.”
On this evidence I feel reasonably sure that Hamlet, Seward and Renfield could have a good tea-time conversation. But a little more on the Hamlet-Dracula connection: Olivier’s 1948 film has a scene where the prince holds his sword up like a crucifix, a Van Helsing keeping the monster at bay. This may have been an inspiration to Peter Cushing, who played the small role of Osric in the film, and would later be arguably the most famous Van Helsing onscreen.
(And as if that weren’t enough, the young Christopher Lee played a spear-carrier in Olivier's Hamlet. Spooky music alert.)
P.S. And now it turns out that Van Helsing's very name comes from Hamlet's Elsinore Castle - see this detailed post about links between the two texts. Talk about opening a can of (politic) worms...
[From my theme-based books column for ForbesLife India – a piece about some books featuring doubles or doppelgangers. As always I had a much wider list to begin with, but it was a 1000-word space, so... ]
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In an age where flash fiction has made way for tweet-sized narratives, an online group recently invited entries for two-sentence horror stories. Among the submissions was this little shiver-inducer: “I begin tucking him into bed and he says, ‘Daddy, check for monsters under my bed.’ I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, staring back at me quivering and whispering, ‘Daddy there’s somebody on my bed.’ ”
The staple interpretation would be that one of the two kids is a monster, but the possibility that both might be authentic is equally intriguing. It taps into our deepest subconscious fears built around the idea of the double or the doppelganger – a shadow-self that may be more “real” in some ways than we are, implying that our knowledge of ourselves and the world we take for granted is incomplete.
Readers familiar with Bill Watterson’s great comic strip Calvin and Hobbes may picture the brattish Calvin as the boy in the story. Drooling monsters under the bed are a feature of Calvin’s rich inner life, but so are alter egos and doubles, beginning with his stuffed tiger and companion in fantasy Hobbes. In fact, a website containing off-kilter, subtextual movie analyses has an essay suggesting that the protagonists of the film Fight Club – an unnamed man and his aggressive, hyper-masculine hidden self – are versions of the grown-up Calvin trying to deal with his isolation. I doubt that Chuck Palahniuk – the author of the novel on which the film was based – had any such thing in mind, but his book, like Watterson’s series, comments on the schizophrenia that accompanies the stresses and demands of modern life.
Doubles or nemeses in literature go back a very long way though. There are the classic formulations in works such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (a doctor isolates the darker side of his nature, then finds that the primal savage he has thus unleashed is the dominant self) and Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson (a debauched young man is shadowed by a lookalike, who seems intent on revealing the former’s misdemeanors). But there are also stories where the double theme is less immediately apparent. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer is told in the voice of a young, unnamed ship’s captain who allows a mysterious man named Leggatt aboard his vessel one night and keeps him hidden in his cabin; as we learn about the stowaway’s past, we see how it could be a cautionary tale, a pointer to things to come, for the narrator.
Interestingly, when the story first appeared in print more than a hundred years ago, it was called “The Secret-Sharer”, meaning simply that the captain and Leggatt shared a secret – but Conrad later decided to remove the hyphen, making the title more ambiguous. His most influential novel Heart of Darkness can be read in similar terms too, with its premise of Charles Marlow, a man from the “civilised” world, travelling into the Congo to meet an enigmatic slave-trader, Mr Kurtz. Thanks to his brief encounter with the deranged Kurtz, Marlow eventually returns with his own sanity intact and a clearer understanding of dark and dangerous places – not just in the physical world but also in the human soul. In one sense, he is like a Jekyll who gazed into the abyss and survived the test.
As should be evident, the main tenor of the doppelganger theme is gloomy and oppressive, but there are lighter narratives too: in Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper two young boys, who happen to be dead ringers, switch places so they may live each other’s lives, and in Anthony Hope’s adventure-thriller The Prisoner of Zenda an Englishman impersonates the king of a small country. Neither of these books is weighed down by psychological analysis, but they have interesting things to say about the tenuousness of 
identity and the nourishing aspects of role-play. Then there is Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, a follow-up to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which Alice steps through a mirror and discovers a world that is not quite a straight “reflection” of the one she knows. Carroll’s books have inspired several tributes, such as Neil Gaiman’s novella Coraline – a modern horror-fantasy for children – about a girl discovering a locked door at the back of a house she and her parents have just moved into. Behind it lies a distorted-mirror version of her own house, complete with “another” mother and father who are pallid and automaton-like and have buttons for eyes. That sounds creepy, but haven’t most of us, at some time or other, viewed our own parents in similar terms? And can Coraline trust herself to make the right choice?
The double motif has had an extensive life in genre films too – it recurs through Alfred Hitchcock’s body of work, for instance. The Hitchcock film that most explicitly dealt with the split personality was Psycho, based on Robert Bloch’s book about a lonely motel-keeper and his mysterious “mother”, but an equally notable occurrence is in Strangers on a Train, adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s tightly crafted novel. Highsmith would later write a series of thrillers featuring Tom Ripley, a chameleon-like conman who slips into other people’s identities – but Strangers on a Train is 
her first, chilling take on the phenomenon known as the folie à deux (“a madness shared by two”), which has been a touchstone of much modern crime writing. Here, the upwardly mobile Guy Haines is persuaded by the sociopathic Bruno Anthony to “swap murders” – each of them does away with someone the other would like to get rid of, so that linking the two deaths would be impossible. Guy and Bruno are initially presented as very different personality types, but by the time the former is implicated in the plan, the line between them is disappearing.
The line between an author and his characters can be just as blurred. A notable example of a character who functions as a novelist’s alter-ego is the fictional Nathan Zuckerman, who has narrated many of Philip Roth’s books starting with the aptly titled The Ghost Writer in 1979: like Roth himself, Zuckerman is a Jewish writer of literary fiction, which gives some of these narratives the texture of a hall of mirrors. At age 73, Roth finally put his literary double to rest in Exit Ghost, in a story about a writer suffering from physical ailments and an unreliable memory but still hankering to be “back in the drama, back in the turmoil, wanting to be with people again and […] feel the pleasure of one’s power again”. Was saying goodnight to Nathan a way of slaying the monster under his bed and acknowledging his own mortality at the same time? After all, writers and their creations are secret sharers too.
“Tod Browning lay in his grave eating malted milk balls,” goes the opening sentence of a particularly gripping chapter in David J Skal’s book The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. What is happening here isn’t as otherworldly as that bald sentence makes it sound, but it is freakish and scary in its own way. The year was 1901 and young Browning – employed with a travelling carnival in the American heartland – was playing the part of the Hypnotic Living Corpse; the trick involved being “buried” in full view of gawking spectators and then spending up to 48 hours underground, in a wooden coffin with a hidden ventilation system and nourishment.
Among the lessons from this anecdote, one is that the public’s fascination with morbidity can always be relied on to sell tickets; another is that individual experiences of this sort have had a far-reaching effect on popular culture. Tod the Living Corpse would later become a film director and helm two of the most influential horror movies ever made, the 1931 version of Dracula starring Bela Lugosi and the viscerally disturbing Freaks (1932), with its cast of actual deformed carnival performers. All the time Browning had spent six feet under was “conducive to thought”, he told an interviewer once. Perhaps he passed his lonely subterranean hours thinking of a future where he might terrify large groups of people without having to himself undergo such discomfort. And perhaps it was natural for him to find his calling in cinema, where a director can be a puppet-master, pulling the strings from behind a curtain, watching his audience squirm in their seats (or as Alfred Hitchcock once said of his fondness for manipulating viewers’ emotions, “I play them like an organ”).
It is understandable enough that horror as a genre is not for all tastes. What’s more bemusing is that so many people regard it as something inferior and disreputable – as frivolous escapism – despite the fact that fear is one of the profoundest and most fundamental of human emotions (going back to the oldest folk-tales like the one about a group of primitive people being terrified by the mouth of a deep cave because they had never known the darkness of night-time). Skal’s book, with its many fascinating stories, is a study of a century of horror in American culture – mainly in film, but also in other media such as photography, painting, television and pulp literature. It is about horror as a reflection of social currents or states of mind; a mirror – or an antidote – to a prevailing zeitgeist. As the author points out, it is no coincidence that one of America’s worst years of the century, the Depression-afflicted 1931, was also the best ever for monster movies (the Lugosi Dracula, the Boris Karloff Frankenstein, Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde among other films).
The talking points in this book include things that have often come up in popular-film studies: for instance, the Godzilla monster as an embodiment of nuclear-age paranoia (the creature is a byproduct of radioactive waste, and it is of course Japanese in its origin). But there are others I hadn’t thought so closely about, despite having been a long-time fan of horror films. Contemplating the effect of World War One on horror in popular culture, Skal observes that “modern warfare had introduced new and previously unimaginable approaches to destroying or brutally reordering the human body” – and this found echoes in the Surrealist artists’ preoccupation with deformity and disfigurement, as well as in films like the Lon Chaney-starrer The Phantom of the Opera and the 1922 Nosferatu, with its rodent-like vampire and pestilential, plague-like images. The climactic scene of Abel Gance’s 1937 anti-war film J’Accuse – 
a montage of the ruined faces of real WWI soldiers – is notable in this respect: as Skal notes, these disfigured men, seen in unsparing close-up, could easily be the living models for the masks worn by actors like Chaney and Karloff in horror films. “As an unintentional revelation of horror’s major subtext in the Twenties and Thirties, [Gance’s film] is breathtaking.”
Equally engrossing is the chapter about the effects of the birth-control pill – which helped engender the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s – and the drug Thalidomide, which was safely prescribed to pregnant women but had horrific consequences and resulted in thousands of birth defects. These events found resonance in books and films about monstrous children, despairing parents and the idea that reproduction can happen independently of sexual intercourse: works such as Village of the Damned, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, David Lynch’s Eraserhead and David Cronenberg’s The Brood, even the iconic scene in Ridley Scott’s Alien where a male cosmonaut violently “gives birth” when an alien embryo bursts through his chest.
Reading The Monster Show made me think about concealed layers of meaning in our own horror movies. The recent Ek thi Daayan, for instance, can be read as the story of a man who, from his childhood days, has had a long-suppressed fear of women; now, as he sets about trying to consolidate a romantic relationship, the fear surfaces again and he seems beset by witches and unsure who to trust**. Similarly, the atmospheric 13B – in which a man realises that events in his house seem to be mimicking the plot of a new TV drama his family has become addicted to – can be seen as a comment on the seductive power of television and how media affects our self-perception. A variant, perhaps, on the famous scene in the 1982 film Poltergeist where a little girl is made captive, literally, by a TV set.
But what of earlier, more apparently simple-minded horror films? The possibilities, if you start thinking about them, are endless. In the Raj Kumar Kohli classic Jaani Dushman, a long-time personal favourite, a hirsute, long-fanged beast terrorizes a village, abducting and killing young girls on their wedding day. Given this theme, and a final scene where three macho heroes confront the monster in a den, the film could well be read as a parable about a conservative society’s fear that its young women might be seduced, their honour “compromised”, before they have been married and safely co-opted into the system. The somewhat confused structure of the film leaves a question dangling in the end though: was the werewolf just a controlling patriarch with an abundance of chest hair? Or was he a saviour, trying to yank a regressive society out of the dark ages - and were the real villains the Sunil Dutt and Shatrughan Sinha characters, who went sauntering home, phallic guns slung over their shoulders, to their little women once it was all over? Go on, discuss.
P.S. a nod of gratitude to the erudite Just Mohit, who so thoughtfully gifted me Skal’s book. I hope to write more about it sometime, because it contains much else of interest.
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** What made Ek thi Daayan an interesting test case for me was that I could identify the exact moment when the film started to become a disappointment: it is (minor spoiler alert) the point where we get “objective” evidence that one of the characters really IS a witch. Before this happens, it is possible to view the whole story as a fever-dream suffered by the Emraan Hashmi character, who may be an unreliable narrator. Much of the tension comes from our wondering just how disturbed he is: does he have deep-rooted problems with women, which manifest themselves in “accidents” that cause injury to his female assistants, or sudden attacks on women with long “chhottis”? There is even a scene where a psychiatrist offers credible “rational” explanations for everything that has happened so far. Once the film reveals its supernatural hand, it loses some of its psychological dimensions and turns its leading man into a generic action hero. But this doesn't mean that the subtext becomes invalid.
[Did this for Business Standard]
I’m not usually enthusiastic about having a camera aimed at me (though I’m not fascist about it either, like the people who believe the thing is a devil’s tool meant to suck their souls out through their eyeballs or something). Even when travelling in scenic places, I’d rather someone just took a candid shot instead of expecting me to stand in front of something and grin moronically at a lens.
Which in no way explains why, if you chanced to visit the Cinémathèque Française museum on a particular Friday afternoon last month, you would have found me squatting next to Mrs Bates’s skull and grinning moronically at a lens. And then doing it again, to get another angle; and then yet again, after checking the light settings and tut-tutting; all the while keeping an eye out for the museum police who frowned at photography in the premises. Nor does it explain why I then stood next to Maria the robot and made faux-dramatic poses in an attempt to replicate a famous scene from a 1926 film.
But these were special circumstances: Mrs Bates and Maria are important figures in my movie-watching career. The former is the shadowy protagonist of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which infected my life when I was 13, getting me thinking about films as art and sending me down a rabbit-hole of analytical literature about movies. The latter is one of the frosty legends of early film history, the automaton created by an evil scientist in Fritz Lang’s great silent film Metropolis. And so, having arrived in the city where people typically make a beeline for Notre Dame and Versailles, for Angelina’s hot chocolate and Berthillon’s ice creams, I prioritised a meeting with these two enigmatic ladies of the night. As Mrs Bates’s little boy Norman put it, “We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you?”
Mother Bates makes her famous appearance in the climax of Psycho, in a creaky (by today’s standards) but unsettling scene in the basement, where we discover that Norman’s mummy is not a living, domineering harridan but a long-dead, carefully preserved corpse. If I had wanted my illusions to be just as well-preserved, I would have avoided going to the museum at all, so that my only mental picture of her would be as she appears in the film. There was something both comical and poignant about seeing her in a glass cage at the Cinémathèque. Bathed in a beam of yellow light, she stood out from a distance in the darkened room; the idea was presumably to make her look spooky, but it also drew attention to her as an exhibit, something that visitors could point and chortle at (or sit down next to and smile stupidly for a camera). Besides, she was unexpectedly small. (What was I expecting? A two-foot-tall skull with shark-like teeth?)
Looking at other artefacts – the starfish in the jar from Man Ray’s 1928 film The Sea Star, costumes from such movies as Jean Cocteau’s 1946 Beauty and the Beast – was a strange experience too. Props and objects that have such immediate, vivid associations for a viewer can, when removed from their familiar contexts, become banal and smaller than life. Cocteau’s film was in gorgeous black and white, but these costumes were in “real-world” colour and they seemed garish, almost vulgar when set against the images from the film, playing on a screen above. There was a series of still photos from the Beauty and the Beast set, which showed the 
blandly handsome actor Jean Marais applying the layers of makeup that would transform him into the imperious, tragic Beast. For anyone who has been immersed in the otherworldly milieu of Cocteau’s film, these stills are an exercise in demystification; with a movie like that, which gives the impression of having sprung fully formed from an alternate universe, you don’t want to be reminded that it was put together by a cast and crew, who were probably doing mundane things like talking about the day’s news or taking cigarette breaks in between shots.
Yet such experiences can also bring a new, more measured respect for the creative process – the processes by which everyday things are transmuted into magic and art, with long-term effects on people’s lives and personalities. (I would almost certainly not have become a professional writer if I hadn’t watched Psycho when I did.) Returning to Ma Bates: here is a wrinkled little skull replica, not particularly authentic-looking or scary when you see it in the cold light of day. Yet someone designed it keeping in mind a film’s lighting and colour scheme, and the desired Grand Guignol-like effect of the climactic revelation. They arranged it just so, placing it in a chair that would swivel around dramatically; at the crucial moment a swinging lightbulb cast shadows over it, making the eye sockets seem alive and menacing; and Bernard Herrman’s music score with its screaming violins added to the effect of the scene.
And now here she was more than 50 years later, outside of the film, in a boringly polychrome world, staring blankly at me from her glass home. It was a little deflating, but the sense of mystery wasn’t completely gone. For a moment I fancied I could hear Norman’s voice saying "I think we're all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out” followed by Mother’s cackle: “They know I can't move a finger, and I won't. I'll just sit here and be quiet, just in case they do... suspect me."
[The earlier post with the museum photos is here. And here is "Monsters I have known", my piece about horror-movie love for The Popcorn Essayists]
Being increasingly stressed out by road travel, I have had much reason to be grateful for the Delhi Metro in the last few years. But one of the more oddball benefits of the underground line involves a personal fetish, which I will hesitantly reveal here: I like watching the glow of an approaching train.
Not the train itself, mind, but the intangible things that herald its approach. This is roughly how it goes. Standing on the platform, staring into the darkness of the tunnel, you first have the vaguest sensation of light molecules shifting in the far distance, so that you’re unsure you can trust your eyes (and often, it does turn out to be an optical illusion). Then, very slowly, the sides of the tunnel light up, the specific effect depending on the degree of curvature of the route leading into the platform; in some stations you can see the train head-on from a long way off, and that’s no fun. Eventually this phantom light resolves itself into something concrete, the shadow of the train glides along the wall before the big worm itself appears, no longer scary now that it has a clear physical shape. But for those few seconds before it comes into view, there is a tantalising little Plato’s Cave effect where you can give your imagination full rein: what is there? What is coming? (Yes, I know, the more literal-minded of you might say: “It’s a TRAIN, you moron!” But indulge me.)
Here’s why I’m going on about this: I sometimes experience real-world situations as echoes of spooky moments from thrillers or horror films (at times this can be the only way to get through the drudgery that is real life), and the glow in the tunnel evokes the effect of a scene from Michael Mann’s 1986 film Manhunter. It’s been a long time since I watched this stylish thriller, but I thought of it when I heard about the new TV series Hannibal, about that most famous of fictional gentleman cannibals, Hannibal Lecter. Lecter is best known to movie-goers for his appearance in The Silence of the Lambs (and its cash-in-on-the-publicity sequels, where Anthony Hopkins reprised the role that got him an Oscar), but his first movie appearance was a 10-minute part in Manhunter, an adaptation of Thomas Harris’s superb thriller Red Dragon. Another British actor, Brian Cox, played the role, and the film – like the TV series – touched on Lecter’s complex relationship with detective Will Graham, who apprehended him.
Anyway, the Manhunter scene that I relive in Metro stations begins with a security guard in an underground parking lot, reading the newspaper. Hearing a sound in the far distance, he peers around at the slanting, covered path that cars take to reach the parking base: nothing there, so he gets back to the paper. But the noise – a deep roaring, along with the sound of something rolling along – persists and grows. The camera cuts to the curved path and we see an orange glow lighting up the wall. The guard turns back again, this time a look of terror crosses his face as he leaps up from his chair and runs away; cut back, and at last we get the morbid payoff: a burning figure in a wheelchair heading straight at the camera, at us. (If you’ve been watching the film in sequence, you will know that the character in the wheelchair is a pesky tabloid reporter who had the poor luck to fall into the hands of a serial killer called the Red Dragon.)
It’s worth mentioning that the scene is brightly lit, and it may even be daylight outside the parking lot – the sense of unfathomable evil created here, as elsewhere in Manhunter, has nothing to do with dark shadows or what we think of as the regular trappings of horror cinema. This is a classic example of a film that achieves very menacing effects by keeping explicit detail to a minimum. In Harris’s book, we are told in a single terse sentence that the killer bites off the captive reporter’s lips. The visualisation of this moment in the film is even more restrained – no blood or gore, just an accumulation of little things: the Dragon with his back to the camera casually putting on a new set of teeth, telling the reporter they must seal their deal with a kiss, slowly bending his face towards him; cut to the exterior of the house, with birds calling across the night sky, perhaps implying the lipless screaming that is going on within.
In fact, some of the scariest scenes in the film are almost unnaturally bright, and the refusal to overuse genre conventions is reflected in the art design in the Hannibal Lecter scenes, which contrast strongly with the ones in The Silence of the Lambs. The later film showed Lecter incarcerated in a gloomy, dungeon-like prison cell that looked like it might have rats scuffling about and a private uncovered sewer running down the corridor outside, while Manhunter has him in a neat, blindingly white room where you could almost smell the anti-septic (I kept feeling that the doctor had a generous dose of Brylcreem in his hair!).
But the sterile tidiness of the setting only enhances the creepiness of these scenes: Lecter’s most distinct qualities – his old-world courtliness, his ability to look deep into the hearts and minds of others, and to manipulate their emotions – are very much on view. Visiting him in his cell, Will Graham is confronted with the terrifying knowledge that he has a deeply psychological connection with the man sitting before him, and that he might easily become a monster by wrestling with monsters. When Graham dashes out of the building after their meeting – even though the only demon pursuing him is the one inside his own mind – you can almost hear his heart pounding. And your own too. If the TV series comes close to replicating the insidiously scary quality of this film, it should be worth watching.
[Did a version of this for my DNA column. More thoughts on horror movies infecting the real world in my essay "Monsters I Have Known". And earlier posts on Thomas Harris and Hannibal Lecter here, here and here.]
The new film Aatma knows something the cinema of horror has known for decades now – that there is nothing quite as terrifying as a sweet little girl, especially a sweet little girl who looks into your eyes and chirrups “I love you, mama.” Aatma, subtitled “Feel it Around You” (displayed on the neon ticker outside the hall as “Feel Around You”), begins with a sequence where we see just such a girl, Nia, watching a home video on a fancy plasma TV screen that appears to be.... nestled inside the belly of what is either a giant panda or a polar bear with a zebra gene.
It is a heart-stopping moment and yet, astonishingly, it turns out that this is not what we are meant to find scary! The panda is mere interior decoration in a child’s nursery, unremarked on and never held up for judgement or scrutiny. The film doesn’t ask us to consider the effect that this creepy ursine wall-adornment (along with what look like a number of Angry Bird soft toys on a giant bed) might have on the girl’s mental state. Instead, the intended object of terror is harmless little Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who plays the ghost of Nia’s over-possessive father and looks only as menacing as he did in his early scenes as the drug-wasted Faisal, timidly asking for “permission” in Gangs of Wasseypur.
As the deceased but still angry Abhay, Nawazuddin gives the best performance in this film (which is saying very little), but I maintain that the real source of the chills is the girl – not in the scenes where she is possessed (those are just funny) but in the ones where she is being a normal privileged child doing the things normal privileged children these days do with their fake pink cellphones and their furry TV sets.
Okay, seriously: being a big fan of the genre and defensive about the snobbery that comes its way, I really wanted to like Aatma. And this is a good-looking film in many ways, with some interesting – if derivative – things happening at the level of camerawork and framing: a showy tracking shot early on plays like a tribute to Kubrick’s The Shining as well as some of De Palma’s great 70s work; there is a long, self-consciously stationary shot in a judge’s chamber where Abhay is denied custody of his child (and Nawazuddin gets to Act with a capital A). But given the minor flair for psychological tension that the film shows in its initial scenes, I wish it had held back for a while before moving into the realm of the explicitly supernatural. Perhaps it could have kept us guessing for a bit longer, allowed us to wonder if Nia’s mother Maya (Bipasha Basu) is to be trusted, whether Abhay really is dead (and then again, whether he really is undead), or if the kid and her mom have serious emotional issues and are imagining things. But the ghostly stuff kicks in too fast, putting paid to any larger-narrative suspense.
A predictable story arc follows, as the people who offer help or support to Maya are bumped off one by one. This is not in itself problematic, but what could have been fine setpieces are irritatingly listless in their execution, and most of the characters are underwritten and barely performed at all. Consider Nia’s class-teacher, who merely looks a little put out during a spelling session when the little girl spells out words that haven’t even been enunciated yet. Later, working alone in the school, the teacher sees a recently deceased boy walking the corridors, and her ludicrous reaction is to call out “Paras! Paras!” in a flat voice as she follows him around.
Tilottama Shome, who plays this thankless part, is capable of better things, which is a reminder that dialogue-writers and actors working in horror films are often content to be foot-soldiers to the paisa-vasool moments – the ones that they know will (if handled with even minimum competence) make viewers bolt up in their seats or splay their fingers across their eyes. Thus, while Aatma has a couple of obligatory scary moments, it has many more slack “dramatic” scenes where indifferent writing meets (or facilitates) indifferent acting. “Nia, papa se baat kar rahe ho?” Maya asks in an expressionless tone when she sees her daughter talking to her ghost-dad on her pink toy phone. “Aur kya kaha papa ne?” She seems equally impassive after the grisly murder of her child’s psychiatrist (while he was sitting in his office with little Nia) and even manages a rueful little smile (or maybe that’s just the natural curve of Bipasha’s mouth) when she speaks with her colleague shortly after the body has been discovered.
And so it goes. There are purifying havans and jaadu-tona and amulets intended to ward off evil. There are unintentionally funny shots such as the one of the ghost plaintively looking up at the balcony with his arms spread out, after Maya has thwarted one of his attempts to have his daughter join him in the after-life. (Nawazuddin here looks a bit like a sad farmer hoping for rain.) There is not the slightest attempt at making the past history of Maya and Abhay credible, or fleshing out the family’s inner dynamics, or explaining how Abhay managed to simultaneously be so savage towards his wife and so tender towards his daughter.
And maybe I’m becoming bleeding-heart socialist in my old age, but I can invest only so much emotion in the misfortunes of beautiful rich people who react to a loved one’s savage murder with mildly worried expressions (as if the new Koala Bear-TV has malfunctioned and eaten the new Gucci handbag). At least Nawazuddin looks and sounds somewhat like a human being capable of real emotion (even if that emotion is wife-beating rage). It’s another matter that he also looks like a boy from Wasseypur suddenly teleported to Malabar Hill. As a police officer played by Jaideep Ahlawat – who was also in Wasseypur and looks like he preferred it there – says, “I have a bad feeling about this.”
Speaking of Wasseypur and Malabar Hill, in theory at least it is interesting that the film’s two main male figures are rustic types who speak coarsely and seem out of place in this luxurious setting, while the women are self-sufficient, chic and upper-class. If Aatma had been a better-written film, it might have done intriguing things with this men-as-primitive-women-as-modern subtext. It might, for instance, have been a comment on conservative men who feel threatened by confident, working women (Abhay flies into a temper when he suspects Maya has been talking on the phone with her male colleague; the police officer has a nightmare where he sees Maya and her daughter at the edge of his bed, looking back at him menacingly, perhaps implying that he sees them, rather than the father, as the problem). But the implications of this aren’t explored, and what could have been a subtle exploration of the man-woman relationship within the changing contexts of marriage, parenthood and modernity – while also being a very good horror film – ends up being neither.
P.S. (Spoiler Alert) It seems a little unfair that even after dying you have to dig your way out of a pit while other ghosts stand around cackling at you. But at the film’s end Maya heroically overcomes this inconvenience and shows up in time to beat the crap out of Abhay and save their daughter. What she saves her for is questionable though: make what you will of the final scene, in which an 18-year-old Nia, surrounded by zombie-like friends and whatever surviving family members there are, celebrates her birthday in the same mansion while the spirit of her mother watches fondly from a distance (and the television-bear growls “Who’s been sleeping in my bed?”).
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*** The Fellini short “Toby Dammit” is just one of many movies that cast little girls as Satan. More on that here
Conventional wisdom says that Karloff was the better actor of the two — more malleable, elegant, capable of playing “straight” roles — and that Lugosi could only do camp or caricature (partly because he spoke with a thick Hungarian accent, his English was poor, and his features limited him to stereotypical roles). You can see the reasoning behind that argument when watching scenes like the one in The Raven where a bearded Karloff (as a convict on the run) demands that Dr Vollin (Lugosi) give him a new face through plastic surgery: there is something poignant about Karloff’s desperation here, he plays the scene as if he were in a “realistic” dramatic film of the time, and does it very well — while Lugosi is leering and rolling his eyes like he never wants to exit the torture chambers and coffins in the Universal lot.
