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The Delicate Art of Making Blockbuster Horror-Comedies
From sleeper hits to new universes built around them, the horror-comedy genre is Bollywood’s next big thing.
Horror-comedy is a genre on the creeping, clawing ascent in Hindi cinema. During the pandemic, there was the direct-to-OTT Akshay Kumar-starrer Laxmii (2020), which not only became one of the most-viewed movies on Disney+Hotstar, but also broke records, becoming the most-viewed movie on TV in the past five years when it premiered on Star Gold, with 63 million viewers tuning in to the premiere. There was Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2, which floated up to one of the top-grossing films of 2022, with a hotly anticipated Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3 in the wings. Ormax Media noted that horror comedies typically rank among the top films of their respective years. Producer Dinesh Vijan of Maddock Films has even started his ‘Horror Comedy Cinematic Universe’.
This year alone, there is Munjya, a Maddock film, gaining sleeper-hit status, earning over ₹132 crores against its budget of ₹30 crores. Then there’s the rapturous, unprecedented success of Stree 2 — also a Maddock film — the highest-grossing Hindi film of this year, raking in over ₹870 crores, and scripting a success that doesn’t appear to be running out of steam anytime soon, still running to packed theatres two months after its release.
This mixture of horror and comedy is a delicate balance. Each could eat into each other’s effect, poisoning the chuckle, axing the gasp. Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 director Anees Bazmee notes the careful treatment the film’s climax, in which the ghost of Manjulika (Tabu) enters Ruhaan (Kartik Aaryan), “Tarazu mein tolkar kar scene kiya tha (The scene was made by weighing the balance).” Bazmee is also the director of Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3.
At the outset, filmmakers need to be clear about whether they are making a horror film with elements of comedy or a comedy film with a dusting of horror, for one of the two always casts a longer shadow. While Bazmee sees Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 and 3 as atmospheric horror films with comedy, Aditya Sarpotdar, director of Munjya, was, without a doubt, pursuing the opposite. “A lot of people complained that the film was not scary enough,” Sarpotdar tells The Hollywood Reporter India. But that was never his intention. “Primarily, I make films for family audiences — for both the 10-year-old and the 80-year-old. They should come to theatres and enjoy the film. Even if it is dark, it must be entertaining.”
He calls it “palatable horror” — or horror that does not stick, does not linger in and lash minds the way horror films generally do. Bazmee, too, feels that even as his filmography snakes through genres — from comedy and drama to action and romance and now horror-comedy — he must retain his primary fanbase — children. “Haath jo hai, aankhon ke neeche tak aayein, aankein band na karein. (The hand must come under the eye but must never cover it.)”
Sarpotdar’s rule of thumb is that every heightened moment of horror must be followed by a heightened moment of humour, and the humour must emerge from the horror, and “not some WhatsApp joke”. So, in Munjya, when Bittu (Abhay Verma) and his cousin Spielberg (Taranjot Singh) see the Munjya beast, they get the creeps and freak out, screaming. Munjya says in his raspy voice that he wants Munni; he wants to marry her. Neither Bittu nor Spielberg know who this “Munni” is. Emerging from behind a cupboard, Spielberg takes out his phone, shivering, and shows Munjya a video of ‘Munni Badnaam’, asking, “Munjya ji, yeh wali Munni chalegi? (Munjya ji, will this Munni do?)” The horror has been completely defused.
Similarly, in the opening of the film, when a young boy is going to sacrifice his sister by performing a “nar bali” — a sinister scene that plays out at night under a voluptuous tree — the horrified girl squeaks, “Par main toh nari hoon! (But I am a nari, a girl!).” Sarpotdar — ignoring the often-touted maxim that when you see a ghost twice, their capacity to stoke fear is deflated — puts the ghost on the film’s poster and promotional material to show how horror is a genre he is blunting. It is the joke that must land.
On the other hand, Amar Kaushik — director of Stree (2018), Bhediya (2022), and Stree 2, and the producer of Munjya — does not think in terms of these rules. “Once you make a rule, it is a recipe for disaster,” he notes in a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter India. For him, the comedy comes from how one deals with the horror. Say, someone is scared from behind. They scream. They then laugh at the fact that they screamed. “This is how I treat my horror, making fun of yourself when you are getting scared. Looking at the reaction on your face.” In Stree 2, when the head of the ghost chases the friends who are escaping on a bike, and bites the backside of Jana (Abhishek Banerjee), he screams, “Kaat diya re daiyaa! (It bit me!)”. The background score is still tense, the grotesque face is still horrifying, but the whole scene crumbles into humour because of his reaction to fear. It is a more delicate, finely balanced scene. It almost makes comedy feel innately yoked to horror.
Noted comedian and horror film director Jordan Peele on The Daily Show had said, “The difference between comedy and horror is the music,” and Kaushik agrees. “It all depends on how you edit the scene.” Often, he re-balances the humour-horror tone at the edit table.
For example, Kaushik was aware that during the climax of Stree 2, the tone of the film had completely shifted into the realm of fantasy and action. They wanted to lighten the climax, and so kept cutting to Jana and Rudra (Pankaj Tripathi), asking if his lover (Tamannaah Bhatia) was okay. These are comic reprieves. There were also scenes of Vicky (Rajkummar Rao) kicking and playing with the head of the ghost, Sarkata, like a football, putting his hand into the eye socket and playing with it. “Fully slapstick,” said Kaushik. But, there was too much of this goofing around, because of which the climax neither registered as comical nor fantastical, not even horrific. That the friends did not take Sarkata seriously diluted the horror. Those scenes were eventually removed from the final edit.
Even as they come at the genre from different angles, both Sarpotdar and Kaushik are clear about one thing — there is comedy, there is horror, but then there is drama, and it is the last of the three that one can never truss. It should breathe and allow itself to be fully stated. It is where the dance of horror-comedy comes to rest. An example of this was the death of Bittu’s grandmother in Munjya. Even in Stree 2, when Jana’s friends think he died, their reaction was initially supposed to evoke humour. But Kaushik realised that the scene needed the friends to mourn — truly mourn. So, he dug into the pathos. One can watch the scene even today and feel that fragility, as though they are one sneeze away from a joke.
Bazmee thinks the horror-comedy genre’s success is natural, given the “naani-ki-kahaaniya” (grandmother’s stories) that most kids grew up listening to. Taking the traumatic edge off horror by hyphenating it as horror-comedy merely expands that reach.
But what is also fascinating is that the horror-comedy genre is an antidote to two of the reigning storytelling traditions in Hindi cinema — the macho hero film and the urban film. This genre requires the protagonist — the hero, often a man, even if the film is titled Stree — to be meek, afraid, and for his fear to be considered comical. “If the hero is not scared of ghosts, then there is no comedy, and there is no film. The villain must scare the hero,” Kaushik notes. These films, then, are stories propelling losers into trajectories of surprising — but not entirely impossible — heroism. Even they are shocked by their capacity to vanquish the ghost.
Besides, Kaushik, whose storytelling is rooted in small towns — a thick subgenre in Hindi cinema in the past decade — also notes that “most of our horror comedies are based on folktales and small-town myths. In Mumbai, you simply cannot have that.”