Fear gets a new face in Prime Video’s recently released series Khauf. Its source is not just supernatural but is rooted in the horrifying reality of hypermasculinity. This horror tale is set in Delhi and shows women being catcalled, felt up and, in worse cases, stained with bodily fluids. What ghosts can be scarier than just men on the street?
The series centres around a worn-out women’s hostel where a traumatic event triggers a host of supernatural incidents. For its inhabitants, there is no escape from the evil eye—inside or outside. Creator and writer Smita Singh, who was part of the writer’s room for the crime-drama Sacred Games (2018-2019), got the idea for making Khauf from her own experiences of living in a women’s hostel in Delhi in the late 1990s. “Women from all over the country had come to stay there. I was very interested in knowing what brought them to Delhi, and I could see their struggles. Their stories had a lot of emotional weight which stayed with me,” she says, adding that she wanted to explore these stories with a blend of horror. “I wanted to show how fear lives in urban spaces and how you can make it into a more tangible kind of a horror.”
In doing so, Smita stays away from some of the genre tropes of creating a sense of dread only through shock value and jump scares. The episodes are evenly paced and slowly build fear through the atmospheric visuals and eerie sound design. “I wanted to create a layered narrative where there is an emotional truth which hits harder than just the jump scares,” she says, adding that she wanted to go beyond the ‘superficial’ use of horror in films like the Final Destination series and employ it to say something deeper instead. “Horror gives an adrenaline rush, and you get addicted to it. Even I enjoy that, but it also has this quality of making you confront difficult things,” she adds.
In the show, Madhu, played by Monika Panwar, confronts her trauma while coming to terms with the evil that resides in her hostel room. Monika was intrigued with the vulnerability of the character when she read the script. “Before this, no one gave me the role of a vulnerable woman. All the characters that I have played before are tough and rowdy,” says Monika with a smile. She is known for acting in gritty shows like Jamtara (2020-2022) and Gaanth Chapter 1: Jamnaa Paar (2024). “This is the era of tough female characters; you can’t be vulnerable,” Smita pitches in sarcastically. Monika adds, “For a change, I felt so good to portray that emotion where I am not always retaliating.”
This restraint is also present in the character of a creepy shamanistic doctor played by Rajat Kapoor. He speaks less, and his body language is enough to spread dread. He feels that it was the cinematography and production design which created that effect. “It's the script and the director that carry you. An actor is a very small part of an image. Unfortunately, actors get a lot of credit, but much of it is due to everyone else behind the camera,” he says. Rajat is also a writer-director himself, known for making off-beat films like Raghu Romeo (2003), Ankhon Dekhi (2014) and RK/RKay (2022), among others. However, he doesn’t feel the directorial experience aids him in his acting process. “It is a different personality altogether. My job as an actor is not to think of the shot and all those things. That’s the director’s job. Why will I take their stress?” he says.
Rajat calls the first half of Ram Gopal Varma’s Bhoot (2003) his favourite Indian horror film. Smita agrees, and together they also mention some of the horror films of the Ramsay brothers in the 1980s and 90s which became quite popular. She feels that good horror is not being made these days. “I mean, there isn’t good stuff being made in any genre, and horror is one of them,” she says. Rajat feels that the genre needs reinvention. “Unless you do that, the genre dies as everyone has seen most of it already. There is also a larger social change which makes certain genres irrelevant,” he says, giving an example of Western films of the 1940s, 50s and 60s in Hollywood and how they eventually stopped making them. “Now you can’t make a Western film unless you bring something new to it,” he says. Smita seconds this and adds that there is a huge need for horror films in India, as it allows us to explore many grave things. “It gives you chills and thrills. I was starved for it and hence I wanted to make it,” she concludes.