Fear Factor: Horror makes big moolah in Bollywood
The genre has gained widespread popularity with audiences over the years.
Raaz 3 starring Emraan Hashmi, Bipasha Basu and Esha Gupta is probably the costliest and one of the most successful horror movies of recent times. Made on a budget of INR250 million, the film has collected over INR600 million in two weeks, reports the Hindustan Times.
What is the secret behind his ‘scary’ success? Director Vikram Bhatt told IANS in an interview: “It is not easy to scare the audience because they can even make fun of your film very easily. You need to find new ways to scare them because if you repeat the same thing again and again, people will get used to it.”
The horror genre kicked off in Bollywood as early as the 1940s. Cult horror movies like Mahal, Bees Saal Baad and Bhoot Bungla worked well commercially at the time, but somewhere down the line, the genre lost its touch.
This started to change with Ram Gopal Varma and the film Raat which was written, produced and directed by him. It starred Revathi in the role of protagonist, Manisha Sharma.
Vikram Bhatt then stepped into the scene a decade later with Raaz in 2002, and managed to up the game even more. The low budget movie starring Bipasha Basu and Dino Morea was the second most successful movie at the box office that year. It collected INR370 million and the market for scary movies got a major boost.
Ramu, who mastered the art of making spooky cinema, got back to the genre with Bhoot in 2003. The film starring Urmila Matondkar and Ajay Devgn was a reasonable success at the box office, being made on a shoestring budget.
The same year, Ramu came out with Phoonk. The film dealt with the subject of black magic. It was made on a meagre budget of INR30 million but managed to rake in INR310 million at the box office, showing that horror fares well at the box office indeed.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 19th, 2012.