The Material Ghosts of Bombay Horror

Kartik Nair’s Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror begins with a beautiful mistake. In the Ramsay Brothers’ Bandh Darwaza (Shyam Ramsay and Tulsi Ramsay, 1990), a vampire rises from his crypt at night. The voice-over says he surveys a land covered in the “darkness of death.” Yet the image does not obey the night. We see sunlit hills, green valleys, and the wrong time of day. For many viewers, this might look like a low-budget error, the kind of slip that confirms old dismissals of Bombay horror as technically poor, derivative, or unserious. Nair asks for a more patient response. He asks us to stay with the error.

That act of staying is the heart of the book. Seeing Things is not simply a rescue mission for neglected films, though it gives Bombay horror the care it deserves. Nor is it only a nostalgic tribute to the Ramsay Brothers and their contemporaries, though it is clearly written by someone who has watched these films closely and with affection. Its deeper achievement is methodological. Nair turns apparent failures into objects of knowledge. A continuity error, a censor’s cut, a scratched print, a latex mask, a reused location, a videotape artefact, these are not just signs of lack. They are “historiographic clues” and “aesthetic cues” (p. 5). They show how films were made, censored, circulated, and later re-seen. They also show how horror works on the body.

Bombay horror has often been described through embarrassment. Critics called the films “second-hand imitations of third-grade foreign horror movies” (p. 1). Their monsters were seen as fake, their blood too red, their sets too garish, their performances too broad. Nair does not deny this. Instead, he begins with the very features that made these films vulnerable to ridicule and changes the terms of judgment. Rather than asking whether the films meet inherited standards of realism, polish, or global horror canon formation, he asks what their textures reveal. What histories become visible when the illusion breaks? What labour touches the image before it touches us? What kind of horror appears when film’s material past refuses to stay hidden?

The phrase “spectral materialities” may sound abstract, but Nair’s book is remarkably concrete. Its ghosts are made of paper, celluloid, latex, plaster, props, sets, light, sweat, scratches, and videotape noise. The book takes Bombay horror’s supernatural worlds seriously without losing sight of the physical world that produced them. Things in these films are haunted because something has been done to them. As Nair writes, “Things do, because something was done to them” (p. 27). The same is true of the films. A damaged frame, visible splice, strange sound, or botched effect does not simply appear. It carries traces of touch.

After this opening example from Bandh Darwaza, the book is organised around five films: Darwaza (Door, Shyam Ramsay and Tulsi Ramsay, 1978), Jaani Dushman (Mortal Enemy, Rajkumar Kohli, 1979), Purana Mandir (Old Temple, Shyam Ramsay and Tulsi Ramsay, 1984), Veerana (Shyam Ramsay and Tulsi Ramsay, 1988), and Kabrastan (Graveyard, Mohan Bhakri, 1988). Together, these case studies move from censorship to production design, special effects, and video circulation. This structure is one of Nair’s quiet strengths. He does not write a total history of Bombay horror. He writes a material history through moments where the films become unstable.

The first chapter, “Paper Cuts,” reconstructs the censorial life of Darwaza, advertised as “India’s First Horror Film.” The film begins with a feudal curse: after a cruel thakur¹ murders a peasant devotee of Kali, the curse haunts the thakur’s family and draws his son towards the locked mansion door where a monster waits. Here, Nair treats bureaucracy itself as a horror scene. Censor certificates, letters, application files, and official memoranda are not just administrative residue. They become part of the film’s material history. The chapter is especially valuable because it places Bombay horror within Emergency and post-Emergency India, when state regulation, delay, and suspicion shaped the movement of images. The state did not only remove images. It made filmmakers wait, made paper matter, and forced time into cinema.

Publicity for Darwaza, marketed as “India’s First Horror Film.”

The second chapter, “Celluloid Splatter,” moves from paperwork to the wound left on the image. In Jaani Dushman, a village’s wedding celebrations are stalked by the ghost of a man poisoned on his wedding night, who possesses living men and turns them into a monster that abducts and kills brides. Nair sees not only narrative violence here, but censorship as a visual force. Scratches, colour damage, leaks, and abrupt cuts become records of intervention. His phrase, “censorship is what censorship does” (p. 34), captures the chapter’s force. Censorship is not only an ideology or policy. It is also the physical practice of handling, cutting, damaging, and reassembling. Here, the censor’s blade becomes part of the horror film’s body.

Colour design for Jaani Dushman

The middle chapters are the richest for readers interested in production design and craft. The third chapter, “Unsettling Design,” reads Purana Mandir through built atmosphere. The film follows Suman and Sanjay as romance, family secrecy, and ancestral violence lead them back towards a curse attached to an old temple and the monstrous Samri. The haunted haveli,² the forbidden place, the eerie landscape, and the makeshift hospital ward are linked to the material pressures of 1980s Bombay filmmaking. Nair shows how the Ramsays transformed existing buildings and locations into horror spaces. This was partly an aesthetic choice, but it was also an economic and labour solution. As studio costs rose and below-the-line labour became more politically activated, faraway places became useful. Atmosphere was not just imagined. It was negotiated through scarcity, mobility, and work.

Arriving at the haveli in Purana Mandir, showing the Ramsay Brothers’ built atmosphere and “forbidden places.”

This chapter also shows Nair’s sensitivity to marginal labour. In his reading of the hospital scene in Purana Mandir, he notices two nurses who barely register in the plot. From there, he opens a discussion of women extras, informal labour, unions, commuting, and exploitation. It is a small moment, but it shows the book’s larger ethics. Nair is attentive to bodies that the films themselves do not fully see. His method is not simply about looking harder at the centre of the frame. It is about noticing what flashes at the edge and asking why it matters.

Chapter four, “Making Monsters,” is perhaps the book’s most sensuous section. It focuses on Veerana and the craft of prosthetic effects. The film centres on Nakita, a blood-drinking chudail³ who haunts the forest, seduces and kills men, and later returns through possession and monstrous embodiment. Here, Nair writes about latex, rubber, sweat, masks, and the chudail’s face. The chapter asks how monstrous bodies are engineered, and what happens when materials exceed control. A mask accident, narrated to Nair by a hairdresser who worked on the film, becomes a way to think about gendered disgust, makeup labour, and the unstable agency of materials. The chudail is not only a supernatural threat. She is also a surface built from labour, technique, and bodily discomfort.

Nair’s discussion of prosthetics is strong because he does not treat “bad effects” as the opposite of cinema. He treats them as cinema at its most touchable. In an age when digital “clean-up” smooths away seams, older prosthetic effects have a transgressive excess. They are too much. They announce their thingness. For Nair, this is not a defect but part of their power. The fake can still disturb us, sometimes because it is fake in such a physical way.

Prosthetic excess in Veerana. The chudail’s made-up face shows the tactile labour behind Bombay horror’s monsters.

The final chapter, “Hidden Circuits,” turns to Kabrastan and the arrival of commercial videocassettes in 1980s India. The film begins with a graveyard challenge: one man must spend a night among the dead before mummies, witches, zombies, and ghouls appear in a scene that is comic, horrific, and already marked by video culture. Nair opens the chapter with one of the book’s most delightful examples: phone numbers scrolling across the bottom of a graveyard scene, along with the watery underscan of videotape. These numbers once belonged to Bombino, the video business that released Kabrastan on tape. Now they survive as visual junk. For Nair, though, this junk is historical evidence. The image carries the marks of circulation.

This chapter complicates the familiar claim that video caused a crisis for cinema. For low-budget horror producers, video could also be a lifeline. Mohan Bhakri’s remark that “video was as big as Bombay” (p. 198) becomes central here. Video opened another territory, revenue stream, and audience. It also changed how films were imagined and shot. Nair’s discussion of filmmakers “shooting for the box” (p. 203) is especially useful because it connects platform, style, and economics without reducing one to the other. The smaller screen did not simply receive Bombay horror. It helped reshape it.

Phone numbers and videotape underscan remain visible in this graveyard scene from Kabrastan, marking the film’s video circulation.

Throughout the book, Nair writes with unusual balance. His prose is scholarly, but it is never dead. He is comfortable with theory, yet he keeps returning to scenes, objects, and images. The writing often has the rhythm of a detective story: he sees something strange, follows the trace, finds a document, interviews a technician, returns to the film, and sees it differently. We are not just given conclusions. We watch a critic learning how to look.

That quality matters because the book’s central demand is ethical as much as analytical. It asks readers not to laugh too quickly. It asks scholars not to measure Bombay horror only against a Euro-American horror canon. Nair does not romanticize failure or pretend that all roughness is meaningful. He knows that failure can come from exploitation, scarcity, hurry, danger, and exhaustion. But he also shows how failure can open an archive and reveal work that smoother films hide.

If the book has a limitation, it is a productive one. Because Seeing Things is so committed to material traces, it sometimes leaves the reader wanting more about spectators themselves. We hear about imagined audiences, B and C circuits, working-class viewers, rural viewers, male viewers, video viewers, and later online viewers. But the book’s strongest archive remains the archive of things: documents, prints, masks, sets, and tapes. Future work inspired by Nair might follow audience memory more directly. What did women viewers make of these films? How did small-town viewers describe their pleasures? How did video parlours, television reruns, and YouTube uploads change the emotional life of Bombay horror?

These are not complaints against the book. They are signs of its fertility. Seeing Things opens paths for South Asian horror studies, censorship studies, production studies, media archaeology, and histories of low-budget genre cinema. It will be useful for scholars of Indian cinema, but also for archivists, restorers, cult film viewers, horror scholars, and students of material culture. It will also interest readers who care about the politics of taste, because Nair shows how quickly the language of “bad” cinema can dismiss labour, ingenuity, and difficult production histories.

The book’s most important contribution may be its refusal to separate affect from history. Horror is not only in the monster. It is in the cut, the scratch, the mask, the delayed certificate, the sticky latex, the reused prop, the distant location, the tape distortion, the dead phone number still crawling across the frame. Nair teaches us that cinema’s past is not always preserved in clean archives. Sometimes it survives as damage. Sometimes it survives as a mistake. Sometimes it returns like a vampire in the wrong light.

All in all, Seeing Things is a major contribution to Bombay horror studies and film studies more broadly. It does not simply add neglected films to an existing canon. It changes how we look at films treated as too cheap, excessive, derivative, or broken to matter. Nair’s great insight is that broken things matter intensely. They matter because they were touched. They matter because they still touch us.

Kartik Nair, Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror (Oakland: University of California Press, 2024).

Endnotes