Pizza , Yaamirukka Bayamey,Muni — suddenly Tamil cinema is waking up to the delicious thrill of horror. Not that the genre is new to audiences, fed as they have been on a steady diet of Hollywood horror subtitled for local consumption. Films such as The Conjuring, Occulus and others have been very successful here, but we are now increasingly seeing Tamil film-makers giving it a shot as well. Only, they have the censor board to contend with, so they have tackled this in a clever way — by infusing a healthy dose of comedy to come up with horror-comedies.
The box office success has given these film-makers a confidence boost and many others are now busily working with new offerings. Raghava Lawrence is making the third instalment of his Muni franchise, while Suriya’s next with Venkat Prabhu is rumoured to be a horror film as well. And maverick filmmaker Mysskin has left no doubt about what his next film is about by naming it Pisasu .
Director Deekay’s Yaamirukka Bayamey is the latest moolah raker, which made it without big stars or fancy budgets. But it is not easy, admits Deekay, to make a truly horrifying film in an industry that is preoccupied with avoiding an A certificate in order to get tax exemptions. “A film such as Hostel would be almost impossible to make.
Though my producer didn’t insist on changing anything, I was pretty clear in my mind that the film shouldn’t be gory. I was all for using camera tricks and manipulation of sound to scare the audience, and not for CGI or make up. I didn’t want to milk the scares too much and shoo away the kids and family,” he says.
Deekay maintains that restrictions imposed by the trade had nothing to do with the infusion of comedy, but avoiding “too much” gore appears to be the safe way out. “Horror as a genre itself invokes a certain comedy. When you are watching a horror film, people get momentarily scared and then, laugh at it as well. I just upped the ante a little. In my film, the ghost is a serious character with every intention to kill people, but the characters react in a funny manner. The gamble paid off,” he says.
However, Deekay agrees that the audience clearly compartmentalises its response to Hollywood and Tamil films. “I don’t believe a film like The Conjuring will work as well if it is remade, scene-by-scene in Tamil. However, I don’t think people prefer horror-comedy to horror. They will watch any film as long as it is done well,” he says. Producer C.V. Kumar, who has produced two spooky films, echoes this. “Any film made and marketed for a target audience will work well, provided the content is good. Pizza was made for urban audiences and it worked”.
When asked why he chose to make a paranormal film, Mysskin responds with an interesting take on fiction itself. “Doesn’t all fiction feel a bit supernatural?” he asks, adding, “I got the idea even when I was doing Onayum Aattukuttiyum . While writing a non-supernatural story, we do push the limits of a character. With Pisasu , I tried to push it a little further into the realm of the unknown. The film will explore the point of view of a ghost.”
Not someone to be bogged down with what the trade wants, Mysskin says that although he is making a supernatural film, horror films need not always have a supernatural slant to it. “The moment we think ‘horror’, we only think of a supernatural film, of a ghost killing people. It doesn’t have to be. The three greatest horror films I have seen are Psycho, Jaws and The Exorcist . I would say even Spielberg’s Schindler’s List , if you think about it, is a kind of a horror film. It horrifies the audience, doesn’t it?”
Academic interrogations into the genre have largely concluded that horror works on the principle of fetishistic disavowal, which goes something like this: “We hate seeing the monster’s ugly face… but we still enjoy seeing it”. Psychoanalytic interpretations claim that they work because they offer a peep into the world of what society likes to repress. The sudden success of these films surely shows that they are touching a nerve somewhere. Wonder what we have repressed for so long?
