23 April,2025 06:19 AM IST | Mumbai | Mayank Shekhar
A still from the Amazon Prime Video series Khauf (right) the show’s creator, Smita Singh
She's searching for a job, and having found one, subsequently lodges at a decrepit working women's hostel, located in absolute wilderness.
Think of it as haveli in the middle of the Delhi Ridge. There are women kinda locked around her - all of whom have been subjected to some trauma or the other.
Observe the men in the city around them, across Delhi - buses, streets, subways - and you realise these are actually the eerie monsters of this series.
Which makes me wonder - what if Khauf wasn't the horror show, about paranormal activities, and demonic possessions, that you're watching.
Would it still not stand on its own as a severely slow-burn, six hours' long, eight-episode, dark drama, simply about working women in Delhi?
No way for me to verify this, but to speak to its writer-creator Singh herself. She agrees.
Singh says, "While I was attending the screenwriting course at FTII (Film & Television Institute of India, Pune), we would be given several writing exercises.
"One of which was to script a 200-300 episodes' TV show. I was a big fan of [the film] Chak De! India. Also, Nirbhaya incident [in Delhi] had happened around then (December, 2012)."
Singh had written the first draft of what became the claustrophobic Khauf back then. Only, she wasn't able to crack the genre. Which, in this case, is merely the style of storytelling, as it were.
What do I think of horror as a genre, in general; honestly? Gimmicky! What did I think of Khauf? Oddly personal, given the genre.
And that it is - considering Singh once lived in a ladies' hostel in Delhi, the rooms/corridors of which she got reconstructed from memory. Besides the sets, the grand exterior is shot in Mumbai's Aarey Colony.
The Delhi she knew isn't too separate from the horrors in Khauf, that hits hard, because it feels real, foremost.
Singh recalls, "For whatever happened with Nirbhaya, I'd board the same DTC buses from Munirka; often skipping the empty private coaches, but sometimes taking them too. At the hostel itself, the guard would sit behind shrubs, waiting outside, for all the girls to return, every night."
Singh used to work on non-fiction/documentaries in Delhi. She began her fiction career with the writers' room of the Netflix thriller, Sacred Games (2018). But we know her chiefly as the writer of Honey Trehan's murder-mystery, Raat Akeli Hai (2020).
Which, similarly, uses genre tropes, to survey lives of the landed gentry in semi-rural Uttar Pradesh. Her family comes from central India's Bundelkhand region. The bleakness in Khauf, her show-running debut, however, feels queasily different.
As Singh puts it, "Horror helps with looking at something deeply troubling within. Otherwise, we look at every humiliating experience, through the lens of shame. I think that's what made me feel horror can dig deep towards emotions, not even examined; fully inching towards the unknown."
At the other end of the hostel in Khauf is a creepy hakim's office. Rajat Kapoor plays this thoroughly blood curdling doctor, perhaps of Unani medicine, seeking sustenance from remains of female corpses.
You could imagine Ashutosh Rana (Sangharsh) in this Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins' The Silence of the Lambs) like role.
Singh first thought of Kapoor from the "silent brothers and imarti scene" in Ankhon Dekhi (2013). I first thought of this film's hakim-den as the haunted version of the family home, with caged ceiling, in Purani Dilli, from Ankhon Dekhi!
Singh read about hakims in detail from psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar's book, Shamans, Mystics & Doctors: A Psychological Inquiry into India and Its Healing Traditions. It's, of course, an "empathetic account", rather than a treatise on serial killers.
Her filmic inspiration is more along the lines of Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968). Likewise, Polanski, more psychological in his approach, hardly employs horror as merely the cinematographer and sound designer's medium.
Neither does Pankaj Kumar (Tumbbad, Ship of Theseus) as cinematographer and co-director of Khauf.
The visuals slowly crawl into you. As against a simple shriek-fest. No knock on jump-scares, though! The sorts Ram Gopal Varma first attempted in Raat (1992), with the camera for the omnipresent eye.
IMO, Varma's Bhoot (2003) remains the best Hindi horror film, because it appears semi-prophetic for the same Andheri apartment you'll go home to; ideally, after a midnight show.
All of which is so dramatically unalike Ryan Coogler's thoroughly upbeat, totally electric, Sinners (2025), that I catch in an IMAX theatre, soon after wrapping up Khauf!
Left to itself, Sinners is a gangster-noir film, with a firm touch of the western, still examining the birth of the blues for a musical, while exposing you to history of segregation in 1930s âKlu Klux Klan' America. Vampires seem so frickin' incidental to it all!
That's the thing, isn't it, as Singh says, "Genre is that spoonful of sugar as meds go down. Think of it as âelephant art' (larger picture), and âant art' (smaller simplicities). It helps you get through."
I'm totally unsure if niche horror-purists agree with any of this! For everything else, there's always Bros. Ramsay; what say?
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture.
He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.
