Thursday, November 17, 2005

Lllaassshhh! (follwed by a scream)

It was a bright sunny day, with hardly any clouds in the sky. It was a comfortably warm afternoon in mid-November. The traffic was thin and the weather almost pollution free. A few stray birds could be seen on the skyline, along with a few stray cattle on the road. Oops! Horror stories are not supposed to take place on a bright sunny day!

Q: Why am I giving out so many details?
A: Just to make things more mysterious.

Quite so often a horror storyteller or the director of a horror/mystery film throws out too many details about trivial things and makes the reader/viewer think more than what it is worth. That way he can confuse the audience.

Take the example of this post itself. I started with the description of one bright afternoon. Probably there was not much information worth disclosing, yet it managed to get the attention of the reader. The reader even started wondering about the next question-answer session that I added to it, before finally getting the real crux of the matter.

Today, I was traveling in the office bus along the intermediate ring road at about 2:30 in the afternoon. There is this busy crossroad near Sony world where our bus came to a halt (don't worry I am not going to spend any more words describing Sony World). As I was having a good time after a rather heavy lunch, my eyes fell on a curious looking movie poster. I am sure the reader has seen (or stole a couple of glances at least) at those B or C grade horror movie posters. Typically names of theatres where such movies are running are hardly known. And today's poster did bear the show-place name which sounded aboriginal to me, and so did the movie name!

"sar kaTi laash" (a beheaded {dead} body) is apparently running (successfully?) all over Bangalore, or at least that was the impression the huge number of posters created in my mind. Now how's that for a horror movie name?

Recently I was told about another such hit movie : bhoot ke pichche bhoot [A ghost behind (or should I say, after?) a ghost]. Back in Pune, my hostel-mates boasted of a movie called "Shaitaanoka honeymoon" [Devil's honeymoon]. They told it was a comedy movie!

The Ramsay Brothers Inc. churned out quite a few hit bhoot movies in their times. There always has been demand for horror movies [you can take my words - this is direct from a theatre owner :)]. In nineties, Dracula and vampire movies used to be a decent success all over. There was a time when film-names that had anything to do with "evil", "dead", "witch", "scream", "werewolf", "Elm Street", would run quite successfully all over. And they didn't need huge publicity as well!

So looking at this outrageous title of this horror film, I tried my head at more (the english translation can be used for a spoof version)-

pyaasi chuDail (Thirsty Witch)
puraanaa ghar (Old House)
saphed saarI (White Sari)
chiikh (Scream)
And finally
khoon bhari maang ;)

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