BENGALURU: I tried watching a horror movie recently, just for the thrills. Earlier, you watched a movie to laugh, cry or be motivated. Today, I watch a film hoping to feel something. Anything.
I scroll through the options like my father in a buffet and realise that it’s difficult to be moved by anything anymore. Even horror movies, the most emotion-inducing of all the genres, fail to make me flinch.
I am not particularly afraid of ghosts. Of course, I would listen to all the stories. My grandmother was once attacked by a ghost. She quickly reached for the Bhagwad Gita under her pillow and the ghost scampered away. At school, rumours surfaced about a ghost called ‘Shambhulingam’ who caught people going to the toilet at night. The ghosts around my colony ate up kids who walked the streets alone. My aunts told me about a vagabond who picked up naughty kids. Gradually, a pattern began to emerge. Every ghost attacked the kids who didn’t follow the rules in place.
If ghosts really do exist, they should be paying filmmakers for reinforcing their identity over the decades. For spreading awareness among humans and keeping them relevant. Ghosts in the movies came with their own rules. They vanished if you showed them a Cross or an idol of God. Priests and pundits seemed to have an upper hand over them. It’s only a theory, but since most books and movies are made by men, most ghosts are women dressed in white. They are out to seduce men and eventually kill them. Their hair is perfectly shampooed and conditioned – like in an ad for ‘Loreal – ‘cos you’re dead babe’! Interestingly, when women writers like Toni Morrison and Mary Shelly created ghosts and monsters, they were a little more humane!
But horror movies still freaked me out. I remember screaming aloud when the security guard’s head was twisted in Bhoot. Or when the girl in the white dress walked out of the TV to ask for Parachute oil for her hair. My disillusionment with ghosts happened due to two reasons. One, I stopped believing in God. And while the one-off shadow scared me, I found it ridiculous to believe in ghosts after rejecting the idea of god. Most people who believe in God, also believe in ghosts, black magic and other unexplainable phenomena like Baba Ramdev’s Coronil.
The second reason was my interest in filmmaking and sound design. A few years into reviewing movies, I began to obsess over sound design in filmmaking. I learnt about the magic of using sound to accentuate an emotion. When I heard a jump scare in a movie, I was more interested in the camera angles and sound effects used.
However, the real exorcist of all horror films arrived in a few years. With smartphones, it is impossible to be afraid of anything at all. How can you be scared of a ghost on a screen when there’s a smaller screen in front of you? Today, our demons are all inside our heads. They show up not in dark alleys, but on 1000 nits screens (with adaptive brightness). They pop their heads up as we judge and compare ourselves with those around us. They squeeze our minds and squelch them into a pulp till we are hollow ghosts of ourselves. Today, the demons in my head mock the comparably innocent demons in movies. They look at ghosts and spirits as funny memes – only a representation of the truth. And to be horrified, I simply have to watch the latest Bollywood release and look at my wallet later. Horror movies are dead, and someone needs to perform their final rites!
(The writer’s views are personal)