Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses a horror film "Bandh Darwaza" in relation to the economic liberalization of India and the inevitable Western intervention into the sacred domain of “Indianness”. The film transforms the phobia of the unknown into the deformed monster of the Western classical horror tradition.

Paper long abstract:

Anthony Henriques, a reader of Indian cinema magazine 'Filmfare', wrote in the 1988 edition complaining that the Ramsay Brothers would be better advised to tap the rich vein of Indian ghost stories instead of relying on third grade foreign horror movies. I take this remark as a starting point of departure in this paper to analyze a particular film by the Ramsay brothers - Bandh Darwaza (The Closed Door, 1990). It is quite obvious that the cinematic devises used by the Ramsay brothers was an eclectic mix of conventional Bollywood strategies and Western horror classics. However, most of the monstrosities used in earlier films were rather undefined while the film Bandh Darwaza created a particular monstrous character drawing heavily on the popular representations (both visual and narrative) of Dracula. The question I propose in this paper is whether the clearly pronounced Western monstrosity in the film Bandh Darwaza is just a simple exploitation of Western gothic for the effect of the exotic, or is it tightly related to the ideological formulations of the period and articulation of the anxieties and fears of the nation. In this paper I argue that Bandh Darwaza, which was created just before the economic liberalization, appears as the embodiment of the anxiety and fears related to the forthcoming changes. Connecting the economic liberalization and the inevitable Western intervention into the sacred domain of "Indianness" protected by the Indian nationalism, the film transforms the phobia of the unknown into the deformed monster of the Western classical horror tradition.