The spine-chilling entertainment

As is typical of the great Bollywood media its entire muscle was obsessed with ‘Ittefaq’ on November 3. First thing this article again is not against ‘Ittefaq’, personally I liked the movie. Having said that in our natural obsession with a movie, which was backed by two of Bollywood’s biggest studios, the media ignored one of the best efforts that have come out in recent years in the genre of horror from Indian cinema.

Once RGV went out of form, largely this genre has either seen Vikram Bhatt’s part Ramsey style horror movies, some of them like ‘1920’ were good but largely they all sounded boringly repetitive and total drags to watch, ‘Raaz’ reboot was one such dragging horror.

Out of the blue ‘The House Next Door’ (THND) appeared and while it is not an entirely original story it does carry some scenes inspired from some horror classics that you would have seen it did have a lot of heartwarming pluses in it.

The first was its realistic style of presentation. Most horror makers, in their enthusiasm, to spook the audiences, end up making something, which looks totally mythological and barely watchable forget the believability. ‘THND’ had a very real presentation style, keeping in mind the sensibilities and attitude of the current day audience. There is no dramatic big eye old man with a stick wandering in the neighbourhood. There is no unnecessary whoosh, whoosh wind, etc.

The stand out part of ‘THND’ was its plot. The director made us think of all the predictable plot points of a typical horror movie and then still gave us a plot, which was interesting. The intelligent ones while coming out of the theatre would have felt that yeah this is another typical horror story but while inside the theatre and while watching the movie the director manages to keep you hooked and wondering.

The actual horror moments in ‘THND’ are not many, there is no sudden ghost jumping out of the closet every 10 minutes in a close-up shot but the scenes where it does make an appearance are reasonably scary. The scene, where the doctor first jumps into a well and the exorcism scenes are in fact very well presented and the next plot point is hidden in these scenes if you are not sharp enough to notice.

The box office numbers of ‘THND’s southern versions are surely better, like the media in Bollywood the trade analysts to decided not even to mention its BO numbers. What was however noticed by yours truly on a popular online ticket booking site is that ‘THND’ had a higher audience appreciation percentage than the right now much acclaimed ‘Tumhari Sulu’.

Irrespective of its BO numbes and the media attention that ‘THND’ managed any true horror buff should be happy to watch this one. Horror genre in Bollywood has gone through a very lean patch in the last five odd years if the best effort in this genre at this time appears to be a ‘1920: Evil Returns’, the second in the ‘1920’ franchise from Vikram Bhatt, then you can well imagine what this genre is going through.

Yes, the south makers have made some efforts in this domain but the problem of a typical south director is his ghosts behave more like south superstars less like ghosts. They have to fly in the air and kick 39 guys in one shot. So by and large horror genre was suffering. One must not forget that majority of the cast and crew of this movie come from down south.

So the fact that our makers came out with something which is as reasonably well presented as ‘THND’ and for sure has a more than once watchable plot we the horror buffs should encourage the makers and celebrate that ‘THND’ actually came out. It makes all of us believe that watchable horror is possible from Indian makers.

As far as I know, the movie is still being screened in some cinemas so the movie does need a “Dekho” from all horror buffs who have missed it in the publicity engine that focused on other movies. This is not a business call on behalf of the makers, but trust me it is a far, far better choice than the ‘Aksar 2’ kind of stuff that Bollywood is pushing to us.