Like transmissions from another planet: re-animated ghosts and/or corpses stalk swimsuit-clad women (usually wearing one-pieces) and their singing paramours. The most familiar parts of these movies resemble (and are, uh, directly influenced by) American horror movies like The Exorcist, The Omen, The Evil Dead, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. But only parts: Doom Boom horror movies are mostly concerned with romantic angst, shirtless he-man punching, and cross-generational, parents-just-don’t-understand miscommunication. Eventually, shaman-like tantriks are called in to vanquish hulking vampire/zombie-types with big foreheads and splotchy monster make-up. And then everybody gets married and/or respects their elders.
– Simon Abrams, Fangoria
Every Ramsay movie ends with the monster exploding. Every single one.
– Grady Hendrix, Film Comment
The history of the horror genre in Indian cinema hinges on a single scene in 1970’s Ek Nanhi Muni Ladki Thi, a box-office bomb produced by the Mumbai electronics shop owner turned would-be film impresario F.U. Ramsay. When his sons Tulsi and Shyam visited the theater where the film was playing, they noticed something weird: throngs of audiences members paying the ushers a handful of change to be let into the empty auditorium just to watch one specific scene. In it, star Prithviraj Kapoor breaks into a museum, protected by armor and disguised by a grotesque mask and black cape. He looked “just like Dracula,” Tulsi recalled in a 2012 interview, and his armor repels the bullets of policeman, making him unkillable, “like a ghost. A monster.”
And so it was that the seven Ramsay brothers, already admirers of imported British horror movies from Hammer Film Productions, trained themselves as filmmakers and founded a horror empire. Ramsay movies were very much a family affair: Tulsi and Shyam directed from Kumar’s scripts, Kiran recorded sound, Keshu designed lighting, Gangu served as cinematographer, and Arjun edited; their mother Kishni and their wives did makeup and craft services.
Beginning with India’s first zombie movie, DO GAZ ZAMEEN KE NEECHE (1972), Ramsay films were popular with rural audiences, similar to the regional success of many independent and low-budget horror films in America during the pre-multiplex days. PURANA MANDIR was the second-biggest Indian box-office hit of 1984, sparking a host of copycats — a so-called Doom Boom — that at once cemented horror’s place in Bollywood history, and risked oversaturation, especially for a genre that was always considered low-rent and disreputable by higher-caste urban audiences and the industry elite. “No stars, no cars” was a Ramsays refrain: their casts of inexperienced ingenues and weathered B-movie hams got to set by bus (and often wore their own clothes, which tended to preppie sportswear).
These were, to say the least, resourceful films. Locations, not infrequently recycled from film to film, took advantage of the landscape of rural Mahabaleshwar: ruined colonial-era villas, creepy woods, and dungeon sets, dressed up with cobwebs, taxidermied animal heads, and random and/or scary wall art, with interesting camera angles, lighting gels, and smoke machines making low-cost contributions to a supernatural Mario Bava–esque atmosphere.
The films draw from universal horror-film grammar — characters sport awesomely 80s chest thatches and blowouts, and make terrible, terrible decisions; plots and creatures were ripped off aggressively from classic and contemporary American creature features, from coffin-dwelling vampires to girls glowing with the sickly aura of demonic possession — with a locally specific emphasis on marriage plots and family-first morals. The monster dwelling in an old house might equally be vanquished by brandishing a crucifix, or an om, and Ramsay films invariably boast a classic masala mix of song and dance, broad and often offensive comic relief, amateur fight scenes, and (almost entirely chaste) romance. More campy than scary, the Ramsays’ best films are nevertheless inspiring for the craft, imagination, and enthusiasm on crystal-clear display in the 2023 digital restorations by Pete Tombs for a Mondo Macabro Blu-Ray release.
Programmed in collaboration with Simon Abrams.
VEERANA
(Deserted Place)
dir. Shyam and Tulsi Ramsay, 1988.
India. 140 mins.
In Hindi with English Subs.
SATURDAY, MARCH 1 – MIDNIGHT
MONDAY, MARCH 10 – 7 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 25 – 10 PM
A “uniquely surreal possession movie” (Grady Hendrix, Film Comment) starring the model Jasmin in her only significant film role, as a young woman possessed by the spirit of the seductress demon who (in a typical Ramsays touch) is introduced and vanquished in the pre-credit sequence before returning to torment a new generation. Perhaps the pinnacle of the Ramsays’ art, Veerana features their groadiest monster makeup and most sinister servants, with setpieces drawing alternately from arcane religious superstition and meta-modern references to horror masters Hitchcock (comically) and Hooper (plagiaristically).
PURANI HAVELI
(The Old Mansion)
dir. Shyam and Tulsi Ramsay, 1989.
India. 145 mins.
In Hindi with English Subs.
TUESDAY, MARCH 4 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, MARCH 13 – 7 PM
SATURDAY, MARCH 22 – 10 PM
Anita, whose parents were killed when stopping in for a quickie in an abandoned mansion, is all grown up and wants to marry the lowly fashion photographer Sunil, but her auntie and uncle have a plan to steal her inheritance, which involves moving her and her entire entourage into a haunted house — by coincidence, the very house where her parents died, and where she, her suitors, and her gal pals are duly menaced by terrifying visions and dreams of the hairy beast who lives in the basement; a sentient and menacing but extremely slow-moving suit of armor which no one seems able to simply run away from; and a strange old man who wanders around the grounds moaning out dire warnings that everyone mostly ignores even after their peers have started to die mysteriously.
Plus: A subplot about a dangerous and romantic bandit king (and lover of Donna Summer) who bears a striking resemblance to the crew’s portly homophobic servant.
BANDH DARWAZA
(Closed Door)
dir. Shyam and Tulsi Ramsay, 1990.
India. 145 mins.
In Hindi with English Subs.
SUNDAY, MARCH 2 – 5 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 7 – MIDNIGHT
TUESDAY, MARCH 11 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 18 – 10 PM
In 1984’s breakthrough hit PURANA MANDIR, the Ramsays found their monster in Anirudh Agarwal, a six-foot-five civil engineer with a pituitary tumor and a face seemingly carved out of granite. “They didn’t even need to put make-up on me,” he would later reflect to the BBC. Agarwal returns here for his other great Ramsay monster role, as a caped and fanged bat demon fed a steady diet of maidens by a coven of familiars. Like all Dracula stories a meditation on taboo desire and repression, much of BANDH DARWAZA is given over to a love triangle, between a temptress — who had been promised to the demon before her conception by her infertile mother — and the couple she tries to come between, even intruding on their love duets.