Hastar is born to the goddess of prosperity and the earth is her womb. Being the first-born among 16 crore gods and goddesses, Hastar is the dearest of the lot but he is also insatiably greedy. He wants all the gold and the grains from the coffers of Mother Earth. While she lets him stake control over the gold, Hastar is prevented from reaching out for the grains; his fuming 16 crore brothers and sisters cross swords with him. Completely overpowered and depleted, Hastar is rescued by the Earth Mother who imprisons him back in her womb and erases his name from any ancient text or account for posterity.
Hastar will never be revered or worshipped is her only injunction. This is the price he will pay for being spared death at the hands of his siblings for his inveterate greed. Until many centuries later, a Kokanastha Brahmin family in the village of Tumbbad in Maharashtra decides to reignite the deadly memory of Hastar. Laying their hands on the treasure of gold coins guarded by Hastar—who lives in the heaving bowels of earth—is much too tempting and is the central premise of the film Tumbbad, that released in October last year. This essential piece of invented mythology pushes the narrative forward in lush, overcast locations across remote villages in Maharashtra where most of the film is shot. The Hastar we see in Tumbbad combines the dreadful savagery and bile-inducing make-up of reptilian monsters of recent vintage. A frighteningly disfigured great-grandmother—the only one who knows the whereabouts of Hastar—from the same family in Tumbadd waits for "mukti" after daring to snatch gold from the hungry demon-god. Dark and brooding, completely drenched in rain which pours like heavenly rage, Tumbadd plays on the age-old tussle between Man and Nature and evokes a foreboding period setting, divided in three chapters from 1918 to 1947.
"But I insist Tumbbad was a never a horror film. It is a fantasy thriller with elements of horror," says Rahi Anil Barve, a self-taught filmmaker and history buff. It took 10 long years for Barve to realise Tumbbad on celluloid. In that period, he suffered depression, became an alcoholic and went bankrupt twice. It took three years to shoot the film as Barve only wanted the real monsoon showers of July-August to evoke the rain-soaked disquiet of a rural landscape and nothing less. When the Hindi-language film Tumbbad became the first Indian film to open the prestigious Venice Film Festival’s Critics’ Week last year, it received a 15-minute standing ovation. It is being hailed by critics as the the most sophisticated "horror" film to come out of India in years. There are doses of Peshwai heritage, Greek mythology and the politics of power grab in India's freedom movement.
Rahe himself is a committed atheist and does not believe in supernatural forces. There are only three "horror" films which he thinks have the requisite intellectual energy to really frighten the living daylights out of our system—Let The Right One In, The Shining, and The Witch. "Horror is not about the supernatural. It is always about the people; a good horror film really respects the element of fear without any cheap thrills and easy screams. It is brilliant and beautiful," says Barve who admits the first 30 minutes of Tumbbad reference the horror stories of Marathi writer Narayan Dharap while the rest are entirely a figment of his own imagination.
Indian horror cinema will perhaps come-of-age with folk stories. Ancient Indian folk tales offer a treasure chest of ideas which are waiting to be seized and repurposed into nightmare narratives with resonance across human histories. Ram Gopal Verma's Raat (1992) and Bhoot (2003), Kannan Iyer’s Ek Thi Daayan (2013), Pawan Kripalani's Phobia, Netflix's Ghoul (2018), Prosit Roy's Pari (2018), Karthik Subbaraj's Mercury or even Amar Kaushik's comedy horror Stree are all examples of mature, genre-blending, striking new horror cinema which have rescued the genre from the easy tropes of B-grade style haunted haveli [mansion], self-sacrificing damsels, sleazy villains, a soothsaying clergy and cheap shock tactics. They parallel the international advent of slick, heart-stopping thrillers like Get Out, Babadook, A Quiet Place and Stranger Things.
But it is the larger realm of folk horror that is witnessing some cutting-edge experiments. Unlike the West, where folk horror movies were mostly concerned with European, pagan traditions and Christian demonology in 1960s and 1970s when the term was coined, India is uniquely poised to dip into the rich reserves of the staggeringly diverse folk heritage, myths and legends from different regions across the country. The 2015 National Award Winning Assamese film Kothanodi is one such example. Directed by Bhaskar Hazarika, Kothanodi (The River of Fables) is a multi-narrative film which brings out menacing shades of motherhood by knitting together stories from Assam's most beloved collection of children's tales Burhi Aai'r Xaadhu (Grandma's Tales) with elements of dark magic realism. In one of the stories set around the ever-shifting sandbanks of Majuli island, a woman gives birth to an elephant apple which follows her everywhere. While in a different village, a mother discovers that all her previous newborns have been buried deep in the forest and yet another greedy mother marries off her daughter to a python. In the most frightening story of Tejimola, a step-daughter is impaled under the pestle of a wooden rice-pounder. These gruesome stories shatter any semblance of rural idyll and recall medieval crimes like witch-hunting in its bleak, mournful, slow-burn scenery. But teasing out horror from these grandma tales is the catch here. "While I agree that folk horror is underexploited in horror films coming out of India, one also has to consider that Indian folklore has very few examples of stories with outright horror narratives. Much of the horror in folklore is incidental to the story, which is narrated to pass on values and morals to (usually) children. So although there is definitely a lot of darkness in folklore, but one has to work with the material to fashion a horror film out of it," says Hazarika. He re-worked long-lost tracks from the Bodo, Mishing, Karbi communities and shot deep in the river island of Majuli untouched by tarred roads or tin roofs, just to get the right, pre-modern setting.
Lapachhapi director Vishal Furia set his Marathi horror film around female infanticide in a cornfield in rural Maharashtra. Most of Lapachhapi was shot in daylight in a village near Kolhapur and used the swaying tall grass of sugarcane, the swish of palm leaves and the shadows of huts to create that element of phantasmagoria, preying on the fear of a pregnant mother and her unborn child. " I have heard a lot of stories of how female foetuses are thrown in the wells like in my film or buried in the fields or fed to the dogs," says Furia. Lapachhapi ran in theatres for 11 weeks which Furia says is a big thing for a regional horror film and he is already making a sequel.
The folk elements can manifest in the set design, in the costume and props of a certain period, in its ethnographic soundscape and a remote, untamed location far from the city. But the real momentum comes from selecting the right story. In Ashim Ahluwalia's short film Palace of Horrors, he plonks his cast of colonial characters in a strange, crumbling palace in the jungles of Sunderbans in 1913 Bengal while keeping intact the Gothic flavour found in stories by HP Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. A wicked agent and his conflicted assistant arrive at this long-forgotten corner of rural Bengal as reps of an American circus company to induct "freaks" and "marvels of nature" which reside in this palace. The agent's avarice turns out to be his nemesis in the 11-minute film which was part of an international anthology of horror films inspired by folklore. In an interview to The Week this year, Ahluwalia had said why the colonial era was perfect for locating horror and how he interwove folklore in a period of time where the British were riding around on elephants exoticising their colonies. "I spoke to folklorists that had been collecting local occult tales. There were scary bits of old wives tales I found interesting. There is a story about this ghost town of Kuldhara in Rajasthan, and another, where this lunatic king cuts his body parts off one by one, causing his family and courtiers to abandon him. I started combining elements, and decided to make it from the point of view of these two British colonial characters that come looking for things to exploit in India, and things just go horribly wrong," says Ahluwalia. The anthology, in which Ahluwalia was the only Indian filmmaker, did well on the festival circuit last year and bolstered hopes of a full-length feature on horror by the maker of films like Daddy and Miss Lovely.
Be it Baital Pachisi, one of the oldest homegrown vampire stories, or the evil spirit Nishi Dak or "call of the dark" in Bengali; Mohini, the ghost who haunts old wells or Yakshi, a demon who lives in the forests of Kerala disguised as a beautiful seductress: these are myths and spooks waiting to be transformed into ever-lasting art just like Hastar who hides in his pancha (dhoti) his purse of gold coins, waiting for the next venal fool.