Don’t laugh: it began with a Tumblr post. Scrolling through, an eerie clip caught my eye—a bloody, sea-reflected sunset, the sudden attack of a struggling statue (Bernini’s The Rape Of Proserpina) shoved to the fore with an otherworldly wail and jaguar howl. What was this? The only clue was in writhing block print: RAMSAY FILMS. Brief digging revealed it was a production logo of the Ramsays, a seven-son filmmaking squad who, overseen by patriarch/producer Fatehchand U. Ramsay (F. U., for short), pioneered horror filmmaking in India.
Outside India, the Ramsays are critically unknown. No New York film buff I asked had ever heard of them, though they broke new ground in a cult genre. It’s not too surprising considering the Ramsays occupy a cinematic blind spot in their own country. Industry outsiders lacking the influence and resources of bigger studios, whose films were too populist (and formulaic) to ever be critical darlings, the Ramsays were dismissed as background schlock for canoodling couples, not film history. Their movies lifted directly from Indian and European formulas, applying genre-blending masala conventions to Hammer horror tropes with a workmanlike approach prioritizing efficiency over artistry. The films definitely show their age (though the period-specific clothing and music is part of their charm) and modern viewers might wonder how anyone was ever scared by clearly telegraphed monster appearances with musical interludes. But despite recycled effects, predictable plots, and plenty of day-for-night photography that ends up looking like 2:30 pm, there’s something endearing about these movies. If horror is where a culture’s id runs rampant, the Ramsays captured the fears and fantasies of a recently secularized country grappling with its ancient past, colonial legacy, and Westernized ideas of modernity during a turbulent era.
F.U.’s clever way of skirting India’s strong film unions was keeping it in the family—though all chipped in as needed, each brother registered as a different department of the family’s low-budget filmmaking machine: Kumar wrote, Keshu produced, Kiran managed sound, cinematographer Gangu set up lights and operated the 16mm Arriflex, Arjun edited (but often got only an A.D. credit), and Shyam and Tulsi shared directing duties (with Tulsi focused on ensuring the film had enough comedy and sex to balance the horror). They churned out nearly a movie a year (sometimes more) from 1972 to 1996, becoming industry dark horses whose box-office results couldn’t be ignored. In India, their name remains as synonymous with horror as Stephen King's in the Anglophone world—and just as maligned (just as bestselling King doesn’t come up among the literati, the Ramsays, despite scaring more than two generations, aren’t cinema). There were certainly earlier Hindi films with horror elements, like the haunting romance-reincarnation Mahal (1949), or the thriller Kuheli (1971), based on Bengali nishi lore. There was even an Agatha Christie-inspired murder mystery Gumnaam (1965), whose sprightly number “Jaan Pehechan Ho” opens Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2001). But none crossed into full-fledged monster/slasher territory until the Ramsay’s hit Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche (Two Yards Under the Ground, 1972), in which a betrayed scientist returns from the grave to avenge his death.
Simultaneously new and formulaic, the brothers shook up an industry stuck in a rut of repetitive, increasingly bloated romantic fare. How monotone was it? During the 1970s and ’80s, when the Ramsays were in top form, mainstream Hindi cinema was so dominated by actor Amitabh Bachchan that François Truffaut dubbed him a “one-man industry.”
F. U. Ramsay came to India during the 1947 Partition, the split of India into Pakistan along religious lines, displacing millions. Independence from Britain further isolated an already idiosyncratic Indian cinema, leaving it to develop its own forms, sans stable infrastructure, far from the European cinematic traditions. Many Americans mistake “Bollywood” for a genre, when it’s just one site of production in a diverse, and still quite regionally-based national cinema that includes West Bengal’s Tollywood, Punjabi Pollywood (operating since 1926 and deeply affected by Partition), and Tamil’s Kollywood, the second largest industry in the region with its own megastars, like Rajinikanth.
Taken as a whole, India’s film industry is far more prolific than Hollywood: 2,000-ish films a year and $2 billion in ticket sales annually, versus Hollywood’s roughly 600 films netting $1.3 million. It’s also a mistake to imagine that the distribution of Hindi cinema is akin to Hollywood’s; it was only in the late 1980s and early ’90s that corporatization created a more standardized system. Before then, established producers worked parallel to small-time investors looking to shuffle capital and make a quick buck. So a resettled electronics repairman wanting to get into moviemaking wasn’t as strange (or as artistic) a goal as you might think. Unfortunately for F. U., his early films were flops. But his sons went to see his 1970 thriller Ek Nanhi Munni Ladki Thi (There Was A Little Girl) with an audience, and what they saw at the theater changed their lives.
Ek Nanhi Munni Ladki Thi (Vishram Bedekar, 1970).
A tale of object obsession starring Prithviraj Kapoor, the film opens with a daring museum robbery. A bleeding, ghoulish creature steps out from the darkness, startling arriving police. Their bullets bounce off the hideous giant. Only after his getaway is a mask pulled off, revealing the star. After that it’s a standard thriller, but the Ramsay boys noticed the audience perk up during the frightening scene. They reported back to F. U.— “The public screams.”1—and suggested they make one more film, a full-blown horror. Ever-indulgent, F.U. had his sons read Joseph V. Mascelli’s Five Cs of Cinematography, which ended up being the entirety of their formal filmmaking education. After that it was on-the-job training.
Here’s the standard Ramsay film: a young couple, clearly very much in love, leave the city for the country, impelled by a lingering family curse or just to get away. There they discover an evil, which no relative thought to kill a few generations back. Fog rolls, taxidermy looms, the monster strikes. The lovers sing their feelings for each other. A comic side-plot of a randy housekeeper or an angry villager unfolds. More terrorizing abounds, until the monster is ultimately destroyed with the help of a higher power (see the lightning-strike cross-stabbing of Purani Haveli, 1989).
Fans of potent giallo lighting and Dark Shadows’s lo-fi Gothic horror will find much to love, as will ’80s horror buffs. Hotel (1981) shares a basic premise with Poltergeist (1982): an unscrupulous contractor determined to build on a not-so-ancient burial ground ropes others into his crooked scheme, each getting their comeuppance at the hands of the disturbed dead. Mahakaal (1994) was heavily “inspired by” Nightmare On Elm Street (1984), and Veerana (1989) goes full-meta with comedy provided by a “horror filmmaker” who sips his evening milk from a skull. The cutaway to his latest spooky idea is a straight lift of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers’s (1978) dog with human face, recontextualized as cursed daughter—the Ramsays in a nutshell.
Top: Mahakaal (the Ramsay brothers, 1994). Bottom: Veerana (the Ramsay brothers, 1988).
Lifting Western horror conventions, the brothers would occasionally replace Christianity with Hindu trappings, but really, any religion would do—Bandh Darwaza (Closed Door, 1990) is closest to a Hammer Dracula film, but in one ridiculous scene the vampire is repelled in rapid succession by a Koran, a cross, an Om, and finally, Shiva’s trident.
The films are studies in contradiction—modern city folk are killed due to lack of belief in the supernatural, but also because they left the safety of dense urban areas for the hinterlands, where there are roving criminal gangs, antagonistic villagers, and in one of Purana Mandir’s many plot detours, a band of vicious “natives” hunting down stray women. To paraphrase the sage, the provinces where the Ramsays found their audience were portrayed on screen as “the cause of, and solution to, all life’s problems.”
Ramsay films operated outside the monopolies of prestigious theater exhibition circuits, aiming instead to run two or three weeks in smaller Bombay theaters before hitting rural areas. “Places where even the trains don’t stop, that’s where our business was,” said Tulsi.2 They ensured profit with their “No Stars, No Cars” approach, the cast taking state buses to set. Their mom and wives catered, actors’ own clothing was sourced for wardrobe, and the same locations and props appear so often they deserve their own credits. But for all their thrift the Ramsays spent money where they thought it counted: the monsters. They outsourced creature creation to British prosthetic artist Christopher Tucker, the genius who transformed John Hurt in The Elephant Man (1980) and created The Company of Wolves’ (1984) skin-tearing wolf metamorphosis. A similar amount of cash and attention was spent on evil idols, frequently the monsters’ power source, often destroyed in a fiery finale seemingly at odds with Ramsay frugality. “Of course. Where would we keep them? In our houses?” said Shyam.3
Purana Mandir (the Ramsay brothers, 1984).
The low overhead and niche audience protected them from shifts that laid the establishment low: home video, piracy, and bloat. Their biggest hit, Purana Mandir (Ancient Temple, 1984), came at the nadir of the domestic film market, and its theatrical run was even briefly interrupted by the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The film, involving a demonic curse dooming women to die horribly during childbirth, seems an on-the-nose metaphor for fears of “modernization” in the wake of Gandhi’s Emergency, a 21-month period from 1975 to ’77 of suspended civil liberties and the consolidation of power during which human rights violations, including millions of forced male sterilizations, were reported.
State censorship came down unevenly once popularity raised the Ramsays’ profile, and especially hard on Veerana (1988), the only Ramsay film with a female monster, a churel, who lures men to their deaths with sexual stratagems. Gangu’s camera certainly lingers on its female leads, but they also shower with bathing suits on. The horny teens of American slashers can’t exist in India, where most youths live with, and are surrounded by, their extended family. The emotional focus in Ramsay (and many Bollywood) films isn’t on the individual, but the family, with monsters threatening their potential for continued growth and happiness. When lovers finally come together, it’s usually at the altar, with a proud papa or uncle hovering nearby to sanction the union.
Above: Darwaza
Films like Darwaza (The Door, 1978)—in which a family is attacked by a rather shabby ghoul born of a vengeful villager’s curse—never aimed at art, even if the makers took pride in their work. Tulsi judged each film’s success on whether he or his brothers could buy a car or house with their box-office take; if not, failure. Around 1985, sick of the way their money was pooled and distributed by F. U., brother Keshu struck out on his own. To establish himself as a moderately successful action and suspense producer, he had to drop the Ramsay name.
In the mid-’90s, the Ramsays’ film success slowed. Sensing the changing winds (and widespread popularity of satellite TV), they successfully jumped to television with Zee Horror, a weekly show running for nine years. It was later recycled and rebranded as Anhonee, terrorizing a whole new audience.
The next generation of Ramsays are also deeply involved in film, with daughters and sons acting, producing, writing, and directing. Tulsi’s son Deepak took the initiative to collect negatives and digitize the family’s films. He also made profitable deals with YouTube and other sites for streaming rights, and, realizing the cult cash potential, reached out to Canada’s Mondo Macabro for further distribution. With easy Ramsay accessibility just a search bar away, it’s time to tune in and re-disturb the dead.
1. Kartik Nair, “Taste, Taboo, Trash: The Story of the Ramsay Brothers,” BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 3 (2012): 123.
2. Ibid.
3. Shamya Dasgupta, Don't Disturb the Dead: The Story of the Ramsay Brothers (HarperCollins India, 2017).