Dear directors, please make movies that don’t look like a plot conceived by a 10-year-old for Halloween night.
If you’re planning to watch Vikram Bhatt’s ‘Horror Story’ in theatres today, get ready to have a ‘funny’ time as judging by the trailer, the movie looks like a comedy film than a horror one. Please allow us to tell you how unintentionally giggle-inducing and juvenile Bollywood spooky movies are. With today being Friday the 13th, the timing of this Bhatt movie is perfect, but unfortunately, it looks like the older cousin of Sony’s famous show ‘Aahat’ than a hallmark thriller. And the real icing on the cake comes from the childish background score of Ring Around the Rosie!
The problem with our horror movies is that we haven’t moved past the Ramsay Brothers brand of spook. We still believe in creaking doors, superstitions involving cats and dogs, crazy ‘tantriks’ and white flowing saris. Uff! For how long will the audiences tolerate such mediocre entertainment. I mean, c’mon, some of the over-the-top scenes look so funny that you end up laughing out loud than being terrorized out of our minds. May be B-Towners think of us average people who wouldn’t mind watching jaded horror movies. Isn’t it like insulting our intelligence?
Have you seen Ram Gopal Varma’s ‘Phoonk 2’? There is one scene where the possessed woman comes down the stairs on her hands in a bid to scare the beejejus out of us. But the scene is so comically shot (by the same man who gave us one of the coolest spooky movies, Bhoot) that you get into a laughing fit. With so much time and energy wasted on setting the scene than actually executing it, horror flicks from our stable come out looking like caricatures.
After watching the beautifully nuanced Hollywood offering ‘The Conjuring’, it got us thinking in this direction. Why can’t we ever come up with a movie that’s low on preamble and high on classy scares? With so much being done towards VFX and special effects, why is the horror department treated in step-motherly fashion?
When was the last time you were spooked by a Indian horror movie so much that you have never mustered up the courage to watch it again? Never, right? We may be country of billion people, but we have so few ideas when it comes to the supernatural. We are still so hung up on ‘Chudails’ and ‘Daayans’ and that making intelligent and entertaining cinema is impossible. Only when we break away from our beliefs and superstitions we would be able to make a better product for the viewers.
We have just one request to the makers, please give your audiences more credit and make movies that don’t look like a plot conceived by a 10-year-old for Halloween night. We want to watch movies that test our intelligence and not make us like fools in front of a global audience.
