From 'Lokah' to 'Thamma,' Here's Why 2025 Was The Year of the Vampire On-Screen

Move over superheroes and song-and-dance spectacles. In a refreshingly sinister turn, this year will perhaps be remembered as the year India swept its hair back, offered up her neck and said, “Fine, go on then — take a bite.”

Vampires have always been everywhere. But curiously, India has somehow remained a strangely reluctant host to bloodsuckers. We opened the door, peered out, shrugged and went back to watching family melodramas.

Sure, there were early attempts. In 1989, Bengal gave us Nishi Trishna, featuring Prosenjit Chatterjee and Moon Moon Sen, heavily reliant on earnest gazes and a very tired fog machine. A year later, the Ramsay Brothers graced us with Bandh Darwaza, a B-grade sex-slave horror oddity where the vampire was named Nevla. Yes, mongoose. This one specialised in biting young women to spread his evil seed, because the Ramsays never met a metaphor they couldn’t make slightly uncomfortable.

And then… silence. Decades passed, during which Indian cinema flirted with the vampire myth the way filmy heroes flirt with heroines — lots of circling, very little commitment. A Malayalam film titled Dracula 2012 staggered onto screens in 2013. Bengal tried again with Dracula Sir in 2020. Then there was the Netflix show Tooth Pari: When Love Bites in 2023, but none of these quite pierced the jugular of the zeitgeist. An awkward scratch rather than a seductive bite. India, it seemed, just didn’t have the neck for vampires.

Until now.

Nosferatu technically arrived last year, but its India release in early 2025 set the mood — a bit of German Expressionism and a lot of eyeliner. Then came Sinners, and overnight, the undead and the uncanny were once again coursing in the cultural bloodstream, strolling through trend pieces, and on X threads.

This is the moment when the Internet announces that vampire movies spike during recessions. Or that zombies flourish under Republican governments while vampires bloom under Democrats. These theories have charts. They have graphs. They have earnest young people explaining them in Reels. They are delightful and entirely useless when trying to understand why India, all at once, developed an appetite for the fang and the femme.

What is more helpful is to simply look at what has been happening on our screens. For the years since the Covid-19 pandemic, the theatrical space has been a sweaty, booming showcase of hypermasculinity. Pathaan, Jawan, Animal and Gadar 2 (all in 2023) showed that a certain kind of brawny cinema could flatten everything in its path. The trend picked up steam, and Fighter, Bade Miyan Chote Miyan, and Singham Again followed in 2024. In that climate, anything stranger or led by women didn’t stand a chance — Jigra, for all its sleek action and ambition, was dead on arrival.

Boys Ran Out of Bite

Something shifted this year. A parallel movement slipped in. Radhika Apte’s eerie magnetism in Sister Midnight; Kalyani Priyadarshan’s spectral Chandra in Lokah Chapter 1; Rashmika Mandanna’s toothy theatrics in Thamma. Add to that Rukmini Vasanth’s occult charge in Kantara: A Legend Chapter-1 — not a vampire film, but fluent in spell work — and suddenly you had a constellation of women who were more terrifying, more interesting, and more unapologetically feral than the bulky men on the marquee.

Squint at the rise of vampire films and you can almost see a cultural argument about who’s allowed to be monstrous now. As post-pandemic cinema doubled down on testosterone, the monstrous feminine crept in as aesthetic insurgency.

This isn’t new — Stree existed beside Uri — but the scale is. These women refuse patriarchal legibility. They irritate, seduce, weaponise. The monster isn’t the point; the reclamation is. In 2025, monstrous women don’t soften. They stomp in, leave claw marks, and demand attention. Glorious.

Here’s taking a closer look at each one of them.

Radhika Apte in and as Sister Midnight

Apte’s Uma is the kind of woman your mother warned you about and your inner gremlin immediately roots for. Sister Midnight begins with the familiar tableau of an arranged marriage — nice girl, nice boy, nice suffocation — and twists it until something feral slithers out.

A tale about repressed sexuality, taboo longing, and all the desires we’ve spent decades training women to swallow politely. Uma simply wants to have sex with her husband; he doesn’t. Left alone, starved of connection, she becomes ripe for metamorphosis. The audience is invited to witness Uma’s hunger, her flesh-eating rebellion, and by the end, to become complicit in it.

Kalyani Priyadarshan as Chandra in Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra

Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra is technically a launching pad for a Malayalam superhero universe. The magic is in Priyadarshan’s strange, shimmering presence as Chandra. This isn’t your run-of-the-mill “chosen one” plot. Dominic Arun (with co-writer Santhy Balachandran) fuses Kerala folklore with kickass action, giving Chandra a mythic energy that doesn’t become a cliché. Films of this scale often saddle their women with tragic-sacrifice arcs, but Chandra is power incarnate.

She is not here to prop up anyone else’s heroism. She’s flattening local goons in a parking lot fight that drains the testosterone out of the frame. Swathed in reds — hair, jacket, the electric glow that trails her — she becomes the film’s feminist antithesis to every mansplaining, posturing male around her. Chandra is part goddess, part avenger, part folklore. She’s the threat men never see coming until they’re on the floor.

Rashmika Mandanna as Tadaka in Thamma

Thamma is what happens when a big-budget mainstream entertainer flirts with vampire lore and then promptly fumbles it in favour of a mushy romantic arc. And yet, Mandanna as Tadaka does her best to sink her teeth into the role with wide-eyed abandon. The film itself has enough ideas to power three franchises but forgets to pursue any. Hidden inside its forest of cloaked vampires is a genuinely compelling conceit: vampirism as the short- hand for outsiders; the unwanted, the unseen, the communities pushed to the edges.

There’s an ambitious backstory too: these undead once tried to help humans, only to retreat after witnessing the brutality our species was capable of. Mandanna wraps Tadaka’s loneliness in her myth — an exile within an exiled people. Like Chandra and Uma, she strains against the limits of her world. The romance may be flimsy, but her choice still matters. Because this isn’t a B- grade horror sideshow; this is a Diwali-day mainstream release, a slot once reserved for the Khans. And here, at the centre of the spectacle, stands a woman reclaiming her agency, fangs and all.

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