Oh, the Horror!

Two of my closest friends thought it was funny to take me for a horror movie just before I was leaving for Czech Republic in August. It was funny for them for two reasons. One, I am someone incapable of watching a horror movie in broad daylight, with many people around, without my eyes closed. Second, since I tend to associate haunted mansions, houses and evil forces in general with Europe and America thanks to some show I used to watch on Discovery Channel as a kid they thought it would be funny to scare me abundantly about the continent I was going to go to soon. The movie we went for was supposed to be the scariest movie they had ever come up with- The Conjuring. Since it was my first horror movie in a theatre I did open my eyes once in a while to see what was on the screen. Despite having largely only ‘heard’ the movie I was terribly scared and it made me only want to cling to my rosary even more. There was something about the movie that annoyed me very much but only recently did it I begin to understand why that particular thing made sense within the context of the movie and the culture it came from. At some point in the post I will be discussing it in details. As for now let us explore other  aspects of my trysts with terror.

This blog is not as new as it seems. It was actually started in 2005 and was used for logging in stories I had heard from people and ‘ghostly’ things that I experienced myself in the three years that I spent in Sophia College, Mumbai, in the hostel. If any of my co-dwellers of the place from then is reading this she would know what I am talking about. Yesterday, I narrated some of these tales to my flatmate, an ex-Sophiaite who did not live in the hostel and who couldn’t stop laughing at them. The problem with talking to her is that she very easily manages to spoil for me every movie that I like and every Bollywood-y notion I have about life (in some future post I would lament on how she completely destroyed the beauty of Jodha Akbar for me). Need I say that while I was telling her the tales of the dead bat in my wardrobe or the black cat that sprang at me after a 3am bath they sounded utterly ridiculous to me? Anyway, we had an interesting discussion on horror movies and why it worked so well in the West while the genre did not have much success in our country until maybe twenty years ago with the airing of what people of my generation would associate with being the most fear-inducing program to be ever shown on TV- The Zee Horror Show (the theme tune of the show still gives me the chills). Don’t judge, we were only six then. So the following paragraphs contain ideas thrown about in the above mentioned conversation. 

Why is horror such a popular genre in the West? The many reasons stem from the very notion of evil here. When I say evil we must consider looking into the concept of it which is absent in the Indian culture. Technically the notion of evil comes from the Christian concept of evil which invokes a range of images from Satan, the fires of hell, disfigured faces, grotesqueness and what not! Of course, the kind of images produced in the mind of an Indian could be similar (minus Satan and hell) but there is a fundamental difference in the way people from these two cultures perceive horror. Let us try to recollect all the ghost stories we heard as children and try to compare the ghosts in them from the ones we saw in English movies.  

The Conjuring was supposedly the real story of an American family. As mentioned earlier there was something in it that irritated me which is that the evil spirit in it was a woman who was accused of being a witch and only the deeply Catholic endeavours of the paranormal-couple-specialists could save the family. At that time this annoyed me because The Church in medieval times saw people engaging in ‘witchcraft’ as evil and burnt them at the stake. Why? Because the Bible said that these are things that true Christians should not engage in. As a result it came to be seen as things that followers of Satan did therefore these Satan-worshippers had to be gotten rid of. These witches were mostly herbalists, people who were interested in all sorts of things like rocks, gems, etc, etc,. A cursory reading of European history in this matter would give us a fairly good picture of how scared medieval Europeans owing to their Christian mindset were of this suspicious lot. Check out the numerous devices of torture that were used in this period to make suspect witches ‘confess’. One look at them in the Museum of Torture convinced me that even if I was the most pious and puritan Christian on earth I would have confessed to being a witch had I been tortured on any of them for more than five minutes. So yes, what irritated me was that centuries later, the West which is increasingly becoming atheist so to speak very strongly still carries the Christian notion of evil and produces, devours and lives in the fear of it. Despite all the progress they say they have made, at the core of it they are still medieval Christians. This does not mean that every evil shown in western literature and media are directly related to the biblical evil but that same idea of evil sets precedence to things that are perceived as horror-inducing such as darkness, nerve- chilling music, the fear of the unknown, etc,.

Pitching in to the conversation my other flatmate made this very interesting point. In the West some crimes can in some ways be justified. A rapist or the murderer might be insane or has had gone through a difficult childhood and has become what he is. One may not accept the crime, but you can still sympathise with the criminal in the context. Consider a similar murder by an evil spirit. The act of crime itself may not be that brutal here. However, there is no way we can justify this crime or sympathise with the evil. Evil in christianity, as far as it means satan, is absolutely a bad thing. There is nothing good about it, from any angle. Satan can never do good things. He is purely and completely evil. Even if we do sympathise we give it a human form before justifying the reasons for the acts of the spirit.

Now let’s come to India. There is no such conception of absolute evil here. Even a bhoot can do good things. So can Rakshasas. A bhoot will have a human past and thus a justification for the crime it commits. In the stories I heard as a child, there was always a bhatakti aatma (wandering soul) whose main intention was mostly to make his/her presence felt. Mothers would warn their children about Chudail who would take them away if they did not listen to them or a yakshi who enticed people with their beauty although I highly suspect that before colonialism happened yakshis were ever seen as 'bad' beings. Of course the affect of these stories are the same in both western and eastern scenarios but let us explore in what sense we Indians feel the horror. 

What we tend to associate with aatmaas or chudail are mischief, pain, anger, vengeance. Chudails are expected to take children away because these are spirits of women who died for reasons related to loss of children. They are either simply seeking to satisfy their desire to be a mother or take revenge on people who caused her to be separated from her child. There is almost never any other sort of malice involved. Let us look at the movie Bhoot which I have been told is one of the few decent horror movies Bollywood has managed to come up with. I have not seen it but my flatmate explained that the only reason the aatmaa did what she did was because she was killed and she wanted revenge which she got when she succeeded in revealing the culprit behind her mysterious death which was deemed to be a suicide. The spirit's focus was only on the culprit and as soon as her work was done she stopped terrorising anyone. 

I feel afraid of darkness, ghosts and a lot of other things after watching an English horror movie because the feeling it gives me is that evil can strike anyone whether or not you are responsible for it. When I watch an Indian horror movie or show, apart from the fact that it looks comical, the stories never tend to scare me after the show is over. This is because the spirit had a specific purpose which is definitely not to terrorise anyone and everyone and therefore s/he simply wouldn't bother coming after me when I try to go to sleep. There is no other inherent sense of evil here simply because culturally we are not designed to see it. What we see is a supernatural entity who must be feared because s/he is capable of doing damage. 

The question is, except for the very few people like me, are Indians generally scared of horror movies? I don’t know. I have seen people from both cultures who are not scared of horror movies but the difference, I feel, is that a western person who is not scared of it is ‘courageous’ because s/he has been able to fight the fear of evil while an Indian person does not feel scared because, well, s/he does not know what is there to be scared of. Here is an illustrative example- a European person that I know asked an Indian lady “Are you scared of Japanese/Chinese horror movies?”, you know the long hair, pale skinned, floor-crawling creatures was what they both had in mind and she said (sorry for the racist answer) “eh! What can these liliputs do to scare me?”.

*peals of laughter*

Then again, my flatmate speaking about The Exorcist said “eh! If you put terrible make-up on a child’s face who is going to see her as potentially dangerous?!”

P.S. Since this is my first post this year here's wishing you all a Happy New Year.