8

The Hindi Horror Film: Notes on

the Realism of a Marginal Genre
Valentina Vitali

Indian cinemas have not produced horror films except for a short
period, between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, when the genre saw
a brief moment of glory with the horror films made by the Ramsay fam-
ily of filmmakers. The family consists of the seven sons of F.U. Ramsay
(1917–89), a radio manufacturer and producer, of whom Kumar, Shyam,
Keshu, Tulsi, Gangu and Kiran are actively associated with film and,
from the early 1990s, with television (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen
1999: 191). Most of the Ramsay films were directed by the Tulsi and
Shyam team, with Kiran, the youngest, in charge of sound. Their films
never occupied the centre ground of cinema in India. Like much horror
cinema elsewhere, they were cheaply produced films that circulated at
the margins of the industry. Even so, the Ramsay brothers’ films stand
out in the history of Hindi and, indeed, of Indian cinemas as a unique
moment: although their success in a niche market for just over a decade
led other filmmakers such as Mohan Bhakri and Vinod Talwar to experi-
ment with the genre, in practice, the Ramsay brothers’ productions
constitute a single instance of horror cinema in India. Nothing like it
had been made before and nothing similar was made afterwards. The
question I want to explore here is: what made these films possible, even
necessary, during the 1980s in India and only then?
The tropes of the Ramsay brothers’ horror films are in no way unique.
Living corpses, graveyards, crosses, vampires and stakes, haunted
Islamicate mansions, tridents, shape-shifting females, angry, many-
handed goddesses and animated objects, all of which form the basic
props of these films, were inspired largely by Christian ritual, unasham-
edly borrowed from the British Hammer films, while simultaneously
drawing on Hindu myths and reproducing much of the iconography
of Indian mythological and devotional cinema. Practically all the films
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© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2011
 Valentina Vitali 131

are set in the countryside. Whatever story there is tends to focus on the
infringement of this world by aspects of an ‘outside’. The disrupting
factors are, as a rule, presented as pertaining to the modern world, and
often they take the form of ruthless financial speculation. Female sexu-
ality, either as a primary concern or as a symptom of the disruption of
old notions of lineage, is also a regular feature.
Arguably, the prominence of Christian iconography in these films
is an effect of these parallel sets of tropes. That is to say, on the one
hand, it is connected to the way in which Christianity reached India
during the early stages, and by way, of colonialism; on the other hand,
Christianity is also associated with notions of modernization, at least to
the extent that, from the mid-twentieth century at least, it is perceived
to have opened up spaces where more egalitarian discourses could cir-
culate than had been the case with other, more indigenous religions.
A different set of factors ought to be taken into consideration as far
as the prominence of Hindu iconography in the Ramsay films is con-
cerned, and it is to these that I turn below. For now, it is enough to say
that religious iconography in the Ramsay films appears to function more
like a sales point, a customary ingredient expected of the genre, rather
than as a function of the order of discourse or as a point of authority. In
other words, unlike in mythological and devotional Indian cinema, in
the Hindi horror films, goddesses, demons, crucifixes and curses are not
the objective or end of narration, but are rather the means to achieve
sensational narrative effects, pretexts to stage moments of fear, suspense
and surprise; hence the prominence of vague, syncretic figurations of
‘magic’, which often borrow from several traditions of both religious
and secular iconographies simultaneously.
My argument is that these horror films mediated what was felt, per-
haps obscurely, to be at issue in the new alignments that shaped India’s
turbulent 1980s. Some of these issues still speak to us today, while
others do not. But to situate the Ramsays’ horror films, or at least their
tropes and their aesthetics, within a historicizing perspective, we must
take into account the temporalities and delays which shaped the con-
stellation they inhabited, framing the range of cultural production and
practices available to these films.
After the First World War, when still under British colonial rule,
India built up a textile and steel industry that was able for a while
to compete internationally. Soon after independence and partition,
Jawaharlal Nehru was determined to industrialize, but not by build-
ing on the industries India had established in the previous decades.
India’s Congress Party, the dominant political party after independence,