In the eerie, shadowy canopies of Sikkim, secrets seem etched into stone, trees, and soil. Drawing from folklore, shamanic traditions, and ecological anxieties, Bhargav Saikia’s debut horror-fantasy Bokshi is as much about witches as it is about nature. Last weekend, the film screened at the inaugural International Film Festival of Delhi, after travelling across festival circuits since 2025—beginning at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and moving through genre festivals in Spain and Germany.
Bokshi follows 17-year-old Anahita (Prasanna Bisht), who struggles with recurring nightmares, adolescent anxieties, and the rhythms of school life. During a history club trip to the forests of Sikkim, led by her teacher Shalini (Mansi Multani), she is drawn into the region’s haunting lore—and into the grasp of the Bokshi—while slowly confronting buried memories of her mother.
Saikia, a self-professed “horror nerd,” is not new to the genre. His earlier short films—Awakenings, and The Black Cat, adapted from a story by Ruskin Bond—reflect that long-standing interest. The seed for Bokshi, however, came from memories of school excursions into the forests of Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, and Meghalaya during his boarding school days in Assam.
For Bokshi, Saikia and writer Harsh Vaibhav travelled across Sikkim, living with locals, learning about the region’s belief systems, including boksi lore and shamanic practices like Jhākri pratha. “We didn’t know there was a living shamanic tradition there—Jhākri and Boksi, they are like two sides of the same coin.” Their research took them to Passingdang village in Sikkim’s Dzongu Valley, where they met practising shamans and learned about folklore rooted deeply in ecology. “The forest is always at the centre of it,” Saikia notes.
Reclaiming the witch
The word boksi—like chudail—has long carried a stigma, often used casually as an insult. Saikia situates this within a broader history that stretches from the Salem Witch Trials in 1692 in the US to present-day instances of witch-hunting in parts of India.
He recalls a disturbing childhood memory from Assam’s Biswanath district: an Adivasi woman accused of being a witch, and her severed head publicly displayed. “A society brands a woman as a witch—often someone who doesn’t conform.”
The film deliberately overturns that idea. The witch here is not merely a figure of fear, it reimagines the bokshi as an empowered feminine force. This extends into the portrayal of Anahita. Her anger unfolds gradually—from a subdued teenager to someone who resists and confronts. As she moves deeper into the forest, that rage intensifies, it becomes part of her transformation.
Saikia describes this as an attempt to tap into something more primal. “Any journey into the forest is a journey away from civilisation,” he says, suggesting that what we often call rage is, in fact, an instinct stripped of social conditioning. As Anahita moves further from the structures that have restrained her, her anger emerges as a return to a more natural order. Vaibhav insists this was not a calculated attempt to “correct” cinematic tropes around women. “It felt natural for Anahita to move through that progression—from anger to rage—as an act of rebellion.”
Colours and signs
Bokshi is visually anchored in recurring symbols, with a striking emphasis on the colour red—from blood splatters and spirals to threads tied across trees and the costumes of the witches. Saikia links this to feminine power, drawing parallels with rituals like the Ambubachi Mela, where menstruation and Earth’s fertility are symbolically celebrated.
The film also invokes spirals and labyrinths—tattooed on Anahita’s navel and appearing across landscapes—forming a central motif—with some comparisons drawn to Junji-Ito’s Uzumaki. “The navel connects to birth—the placenta, the idea of origin.” The labyrinth, in turn, reflects Anahita’s journey to her destiny—slow and inevitable. “You can’t skip steps in a labyrinth,” he adds. “You move slowly, and eventually you reach the centre—which is fate.”
The mother of all languages
Language plays a crucial role in building Bokshi’s world. Alongside Hindi, English and Nepali, the film introduces Boksirit—a fictional language created by Dutch linguist Jan van Steenbergen.
“A language is not just a tool for communication,” Saikia says. “It carries culture, thought and worldview.” Boksirit is imagined as the “mother of all languages, aligning with the film’s idea of the Bokshi as the first human. “Boksirit represents the worldview of Bokshi and her sisters—something ancient that was forgotten and is now being remembered through the film.” Built using influences from Proto-Indo-European language families, it is designed to sound primal and ancient, and features prominently in the film’s climax. At the Delhi screening, two audience members—one Sumerian and another Iranian—remarked that they could hear words from their own languages within Boksirit; there is a plan to present the language at an annual conlangers’ conference in Denmark.
State of horror
Despite Indian cinema’s long engagement with horror—from the films of the Ramsay Brothers in the 1980s and ’90s, to Ram Gopal Varma’s Raat, Bhoot, and Kaun, and Vikram Bhatt’s Raaz franchise—there has been no shortage of stories. More recently, films like Stree have brought horror back into the mainstream, while regional industries continue to draw from folklore through films like Kantara and Bramayugam.
Yet, Saikia believes the genre still struggles for legitimacy. Genre cinema is often treated as niche, with horror, science fiction and fantasy rarely seen as “serious” filmmaking. “There’s still this idea that horror can’t be art or an art film,” he says, recalling being asked how a horror film could qualify as an art film.
Greater creative freedom and trust, he argues, are essential for the genre to evolve. “Scaring people is not easy,” he says. “The audience already knows it’s not real. You have to make them believe.”