Cinemas of India: Dharavi, Party, Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda, Salim Langde pe Mat Ro

[With the theatrical rerelease of Jaane bhi do Yaaro - in the restored "Cinemas of India" print - scheduled this week, here is a piece I did for The Caravan around the time my book on the film was published. And below is the full text of my essay - also for The Caravan - about four other NFDC-restored films]

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It’s no secret that we in India have been largely indifferent to the preservation of our cinematic heritage. Prints of movies barely a few decades old are frequently in a dismal state, with the worst sufferers being low-budget, non-studio films that never had an extended theatrical run. There are cases of non-mainstream directors and actors not having access to their own seminal work. Naseeruddin Shah once told me that his only print of Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai was a battered video-cassette: “Come to my place if you want to see it, I’m not lending it to anyone.” The actor Pawan Malhotra interrupted an interview to plaintively ask if I had seen a disc of Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro, which featured his best starring role.

Linked to this neglect is a more general apathy to how movies should ideally be experienced. Glossy DVD covers conceal faded, scratch-ridden prints of old films, with many scenes missing a few seconds of footage. Audio quality is often so bad it can make one weep (more than once, I have had to switch on the subtitles for Hindi films) and there are cases of shoddy recording where sound and visual are not synchronised. Cheaply rented pirated discs seem geared to functional movie-watching where the only purpose is to perfunctorily follow the bare bones of a plot, rather than to fully experience the visual and aural qualities of a film.

What a sight for sore eyes and a treat for straining ears, then, are the new “Cinemas of India” DVDs released by the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) in collaboration with Shemaroo. These well-restored prints of non-mainstream films (insert your label of choice: Art or Parallel Film, New Wave Cinema) produced by NFDC in the 1980s and early 90s represent what the movie-watching experience can be – the images are nearly spotless, the colours vivid, the audio clear. View a couple of them and you’ll find it difficult to go back to regular DVD-watching.

The Cinemas of India DVDs represent my first sighting of Salim Langde... as well as Tapan Sinha’s Ek Doctor Ki Maut, Awtar Krishna Kaul’s 27 Down and Sudhir Mishra’s Dharavi, at least in this format (they may have been floating about on that execrable third-world invention, the VCD). Some other films – Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala, Arun Kaul’s Diksha – have been available, but have never looked this good before. And though the cult of Kundan Shah’s iconic comedy Jaane bhi do Yaaro grows each day, I hadn’t come across a DVD of it in the past two years (possibly the earlier Shemaroo edition was taken out of circulation to pave the way for this new, two-disc set containing an interview with the director).

But the real Holy Grail (and for me personally, the highlight of these releases) is the new print of Govind Nihalani’s superb 1984 film Party. Adapted by Nihalani and Mahesh Elkunchwar from the latter’s play, this cutting social satire may be the best representation I’ve seen in Hindi cinema of the chamber drama (where characters are forced into self-reflection in a closed setting) as well as of the ensemble movie. It is so well written and performed that it should stimulate even those who are ambivalent about its ideological position (namely, that art and politics are necessarily inseparable). And yet, it has been out of circulation for years.

In Party’s opening 20 minutes, we are introduced to various sets of people – most of them writers or artists, or otherwise connected with the cultural world – who will gather at the house of arts patron Damayanti Rane (Vijaya Mehta). The much-felicitated poet Barve (Manohar Singh) is accompanied by his depressive, alcoholic wife Mohini (Rohini Hattangadi), a failed actress who seems constantly to be “performing”, even in private moments with her husband. Other guests include a theatre actor (Shafi Inamdar) who is more adept at separating himself from his roles (“The suffering isn’t mine; it’s the suffering of the character inside me”), the faux-liberal Vrinda (Gulan Kripalani) who specialises in preaching social responsibility to others, and a dignified doctor (Amrish Puri) who is an outsider to this circle (possibly a stand-in for the viewer), watching from a distance, making the others uneasy (“Lagta hai aap lagaataar humein dekh rahe hain,” Barve tells him jokingly).

As the evening progresses, little details of character emerge. When we see how the aspiring poet Bharat (K K Raina) shrinks from getting his brand-new kurta ruffled at a bus-stop, we understand how much the invitation to this party (populated by potential “contacts”) means to him. Vrinda bickers with a playwright about the shameless populism of his writing and he retorts “You Marxists speak of the aam aadmi, yet you mock his tastes while sitting comfortably in your Malabar Hills bungalows.” Private epiphanies are experienced and confessions made, and what began as a parade of stereotypes becomes a complex skein of people, capable of self-awareness but bound in the traps they have created for themselves. This aspect of Party reminded me of Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, in which a group of sophisticates settle down for a dinner party and then find they cannot escape their claustrophobic setting.

Inevitably, then, much of the conversation converges on someone who did succeed in leaving – a poet named Amrit, friend to many of those present, who is now living with and helping the cause of exploited tribals. This enigmatic figure – reminiscent in some ways of Beckett’s Godot and Conrad’s Mr Kurtz – becomes a catalyst for our understanding of these people. Their feelings about him run from hero-worship to amused indifference to contempt (perhaps Amrit’s “activism” is a cover for his being a creative spent force, Barve remarks drily). But when a journalist named Avinash (Om Puri) – the only person to have met Amrit recently – joins the group, banter gives way to an intense, no-holds-barred debate about an artist’s role in an injustice-ridden society. Is it enough for him to work in seclusion, or must he put himself at risk by participating in the world?

Like nearly all of Nihalani’s work, Party is politically charged and explicitly idea-driven. It remains a startlingly fresh film in its big discussions as well as in its casual chatter about the literary world (Rushdie vs Naipaul, “brown-sahib” snobbery vs “vernacular” snobbery, the inattention to the female perspective in a male writer’s work). Importantly, though it is adapted from a theatrical work (and features a cast of fine stage actors – Mehta’s performance in the relatively unshowy part of the hostess becomes more impressive each time you see it), it is not just a static filming of a stage production. The use of space, the many lovely still compositions, the positioning of the characters relative to each other, the cross-cutting between groups of people – all these show a strong cinematic sense. Frequently, parallels or contrasts exist within the same frame: as Bharat recites one of Amrit’s angry poems, we see youngsters dancing blithely through a window in the background; there is a fleeting moment when two “gatecrashers” move through a room looking bemused at the serious talk happening around them.

This is a splendidly constructed, designed and choreographed work, and though it is driven by talk, it ends with a harrowing nightmare scene that is entirely wordless – a scene where an old poet and a young poet (one man who has lived a complacent life, feeding off his own reputation; another who is in danger of doing the same) gaze into a distorting mirror and face their consciences. Mindful though I am of hyperbole while rating movies, I think this is among the great Hindi films. 
(An extended version of this essay on Party is here)

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If Party proposes that the true artist should be more than a detached observer with a splinter of ice in his heart, Shyam Benegal’s Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda determinedly blurs the line between a storyteller and his tale, and between fact and fiction. Nihalani was once Benegal’s cinematographer and I can imagine Party and Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda having a conversation about art and artists, with the latter adopting a more relaxed, playful attitude towards the subject. It opens with a scene where a painting of a mohalla, as seen in an art exhibition, dissolves into the mohalla itself, and ends with a shot of the raconteur-in-chief Manek babu walking off into the mist of another story, much like Buster Keaton’s movie projectionist entering the screen in Sherlock Jr.

Benegal’s reputation as a leader of the parallel movement was formed in the 1970s with such films as Manthan, Nishant and Bhumika, but this film, made in 1991 (and based on Dharamvir Bharati’s novella), is one of his most accomplished works – a clever, self-referential comment on the nature of storytelling. This is partly achieved by the non-linearity of the narrative, which coils back on itself like a serpent swallowing its own tail; a scene might be repeated from a different perspective, giving it a marginally different timbre and altering our feelings about the characters.

Manek (Rajit Kapoor) doesn’t seem to be more than 25 or 26 but relates his stories as if they were personal experiences from a very distant time. His tales – about his encounters with three different sorts of women – link into each other in unexpected ways; they are driven by Vanraj Bhatia’s fine music score, and they all centre on romance and betrayal. But they are subject to varied interpretations, and one is always aware of an element of artifice – a sense that a story is being constructed in collaboration with the people who are listening to it. Manek wryly maintains that a good love story should be uplifting to society (“acchi prem kahaani samaaj ke liye kalyaankari honi chahiye”) and that stories like Devdas are “sentimental junk” because they lack a “moral”, but his own actions in his narratives are less than edifying; he portrays himself as limp-wristed, responsibility-shirking and cowardly.

A different sort of storyteller (one who constructs inner worlds to keep his own hopes alive) is the protagonist of Sudhir Mishra’s Dharavi (1991). The film’s title refers to the famous Mumbai slum in which it is set, but a subtitle in the opening credits gives the word its literal meaning: “Quicksand”. This is a place where even an animal used to the desert might easily sink – and indeed, there is a strange early scene involving a runaway camel who dies in the slum!

“Bolne ko toh sabhi ret ke jaanwar hain – yahaan marne ko aaye hain” (“We are all desert animals who have come here to die”) says a voiceover by longtime resident Rajkaran (Om Puri), who works as a cab-driver. But Rajkaran is an essentially sanguine man looking to pull himself out of the mire – while his pragmatic wife Kunda (Shabana Azmi) brings in a steady income by working in a sewing mill, he has been saving to invest in a cloth factory, and he may have other tricks up his sleeve. I thought he bore a striking resemblance to Ayyan Mani, the resourceful protagonist of Manu Joseph’s fine novel Serious Men, about a chawl-dweller living by his wits.

Of course, Rajkaran has his Madhuri Dixit dreams to keep himself going, and Dharavi contains telling scenes where one cinematic idiom collides with another. The opening sequence winks at the mainstream-movie culture of the time with a clip from a fictitious film titled Shahar ka Shahenshah, starring Anil Kapoor as a slum-boy now returned to protect his childhood turf from machine gun-toting baddies. (When this onscreen hero proclaims “Yeh basti hamaari hai”, the real slum-children cheer. But soon real life takes over: local hoodlums set fire to the projection tent, which leads to a mesmeric shot of the “screen” bursting into flames with Madhuri Dixit’s red-sari-clad image still on it.) An amusing later sequence features Rajkaran and Kunda having a domestic squabble against a screen showing another (actual) Kapoor-Dixit starrer, Parinda (directed by Sudhir Mishra’s real-life buddy Vidhu Vinod Chopra, who had just crossed over into bigger-budget cinema).

Mishra’s film is about the human spirit refusing to be beaten back by heavy odds, but it is also full of lovely little visual touches that leap out at you when you watch them on this print. Bright red and green dupattas flutter outside the factory that Rajkaran dreams of buying (even the colour configuration seems to stand for the “stop-start” nature of his capricious project); an unexpected close-up of a large, cherry-red Ganesha statue is used as a punctuation mark after a conversation ends; an almost Scorsese-like sense of urgency is created by a constantly moving camera in the busy sequence where Rajkaran goes to negotiate with a middleman, with the latter’s four wives (dressed in different-coloured burkhas) wailing in a corner of the room; there is a simple yet startlingly effective shot of curtains in a room billowing slightly inward as a train passes outside the room where Rajkaran is sitting with his friends. And there are many striking shots from inside Rajkaran’s taxi, a picture of his Madhuri hanging in the front.

An underappreciated aspect of Mishra’s work is his penchant for black humour, which may have been fine-tuned when he worked as a young assistant producer on Jaane bhi do Yaaro in 1982. “I tend to search for the comic possibilities in even a very bleak situation,” he told me once during an interview. There are a few such touches here too, among them a shot of a just-discovered corpse with a transistor playing the song “Don’t worry, be happy”, and a gang-war scene where a man is slashed across his chest just in front of a board that has a crude romantic drawing of a heart with an arrow through it. None of this detracts from the essential seriousness of the film, though. The only flaw in Dharavi, I thought, was in the casting of the two leads. Nothing Puri or Azmi do here can be faulted, but they were both in their forties when the film was made – arguably too old for these parts – in addition to being established stars of non-mainstream cinema; the film may have worked better with less familiar faces in the roles.

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Dharavi’s main narrative is interspersed with vignettes of slum children playing grown-up, usually by imitating the things they have been seeing in masala movies (in one scene little boys mock-pursue a little girl, who does her bit by mock-screaming “Bachao”). I was reminded of these swaggering children while watching Salim Pasha (Pawan Malhotra) and his cohorts in Saeed Mirza’s Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (1989). Malhotra is a small-built man with an unthreatening voice, but that is only one reason why Salim – who saunters about his district collecting hafta and committing petty crime – often comes across as a child pretending to be an adult. (He wears a canvas jacket and a fish-net vest, he talks the talk and struts the strut, but when a friend is murdered he vents his frustrations by shooting down fighter planes in a video game.) “Iss shaher mein gunda banna toh bachhon ka khel hai,” an acquaintance, the idealistic Aslam, tells him in a key scene, “Mushkil toh sharaafat se jeena hai.” (“In a city like this, it’s child’s play to be a hoodlum. What’s difficult is to follow the path of honesty.”) In a sense, then, Mirza’s film is a coming-of-age story: a young man growing to self-awareness, slowly turning his face away from what is the easy way out for someone born in his class and circumstances.

It begins with Salim introducing us to his basti and the people who are part of his life: his family, including a disapproving father and a sweet younger sister; the dancing girl Mumtaz (“chamakti Mumtaz”), whom he loves; a faux-philosophising, guitar-strumming firang called “Jani Hippie”; the local smugglers and policemen who are inevitably in cahoots. (“Dekho, smuggler ke kandhe pe kanoon ka haath,” someone wittily observes as a cop scrapes before a man he should be arresting.) There is a touch of documentary to these early scenes, but they also have a stylised quality: the opening-title sequence gives the city a bleached, otherworldly look, the camera tracks constantly, drawing us ever further into Salim’s milieu (and, by extension, his inner world).

Salim Langde... is an unevenly paced film – very breezy in places (with a couple of inspired comic skits such as the one where Salim’s buddies imitate the mannerisms of posh college-goers), but then juddering to a halt as a character (mainly the conscientious Aslam) holds forth on such matters as the bloody history of the subcontinent and the need for Muslims to embrace education. Much like Mirza’s capricious book Ammi: Letter to a Democratic Mother, it mixes compelling narrative with self-conscious preaching, and the ending is a little abrupt (though that may well have been intentional).

Hindu-Muslim riots are a humming presence in the background of Salim’s life: when local hoodlums encroach on each other’s territory, it becomes a metaphor for communal clashes and the splitting of the country along religious lines. (“Apna area! Unka area! Sab log ka area alag-alag ho gaya hai,” a character rues.) The drug-addled hippie invokes nuclear destruction and observes that India is a good place to die in; posters of Martin Luther King and a mushroom cloud share space on a cafe wall, while another wall amusingly has portraits of Gods separated by large advertisements for razor blades. The link between poverty and crime (with religion as a catalyst) is made abundantly clear, and our hero must find a way to choose between rokda and izzat. A question that was central to Dharavi is raised here in a slightly different context: “Hai koi tareeka gutter se baahar nikalne ka?” (“Is there any way to get out of this gutter?”) Like Rajkaran and Amrit – “heroes” of the other films mentioned above – Salim Pasha must try to balance personal integrity and ideals with his circumstances.

(Also see this post on Saeed Mirza's first feature film Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastan)

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Watching these films in succession, it strikes me that these print restorations are important for another reason: they help us overcome a mental block against discussing non-mainstream movies in terms of their aesthetic appeal.

Many viewers of my generation grew up seeing (or being forced to see) these films on monochrome TV sets and believing that they were meant to be edifying but joyless experiences. In some cases this impression spilled over into adulthood. These movies are characterised by stark writing, gritty performances and “real” emotions, we told ourselves, and surely such things can be appreciated even in dull colours and scratchy prints? (Looked at in one way, poor prints can even heighten the effect of such works by reminding us that they were made on low budgets – that this was the nuanced Cinema of Struggle, not the facile Cinema of Mass Entertainment.)

However, these restorations make it possible to appreciate the cinematic brio and imagination. They are reminders that directors like Nihalani, Benegal and Mishra were weaned on the vibrant international movements of the 1960s and 70s – the cinematic new waves in countries ranging from France and Japan to Germany, Czechoslovakia and the US. However “socially relevant” and “message-oriented” the films made in these movements were, the best of them were formally dynamic too. You’d have to be a real pedant (and, I would suggest, half-blind as well) to discuss Party and Dharavi only in terms of their content and ideas, without dwelling on how they do what they do. What makes them so good is a synthesis between depth of content and depth of execution.

For the Indian film buff who believes that aesthetic pleasure is vital to the movie-watching process (even when the movies themselves are “serious”) and who has been exposed to brilliant prints of international classics, these restorations are a first step in what will hopefully be a more rigorous approach to our filmic past. In the year that our cinema celebrates its centenary, it should not be too much to expect that movies only a few decades old should look the best they can.

A postscript: in the US, there has been discussion on movie websites about prints of some old noir films being “over-restored” to the extent that scenes that were meant to be shadowy had been rendered incongruously bright. Watching the Cinemas of India DVDs, I occasionally had similar misgivings. Jaane bhi do Yaaro’s director Kundan Shah once told me that the glow on the sides of the frame during the film’s Mahabharata climax was caused by the use of exposed film (this is itself a poignant reminder of the lack of resources available to the crew and a vital part of the mythology of the film). Perhaps I’m imagining it, but on the new DVD that glow seems reduced. It makes one wonder if technology has reached a point where the Cinema of Struggle can be digitally converted into the Cinema of Glamour!

Conversations about Indian literature at Samanvay

The second edition of Samanvay, the IHC Indian Languages Festival, takes place at the India Habitat Centre, Delhi from November 2-4, and more than 60 writers representing 14 languages will be in attendance. Do drop in if you’re interested in the various talking points around Indian literature. (A full schedule of events is here. I'm moderating a session titled "English: Where's my reader?" on the 3rd.)

Imitations of life

It took some hours of procrastination and a cup of strong coffee, and my finger may have trembled as I clicked the “play” button, but I did finally watch the trailer of the forthcoming film Hitchcock, about Alfred Hitchcock and the making of Psycho in 1959-60. It was nearly as unsettling as I had imagined – and not just because Psycho is enormously dear to my heart, or because one likes to think that the world in which that film was made was necessarily a black-and-white world, or because I admire Stephen Rebello’s book on which this new movie is (very loosely) based. On the tiny YouTube screen was one of the most honourable actors of the past few decades – not hamming it up exactly, but imitating away.

A two-minute trailer is limited evidence to base a judgement on, but Anthony Hopkins’s performance in the Hitchcock role looked like mimickry to my eyes, as opposed to the considered acting that involves building a character from the inside out. The attempt to make his features approximate Hitchcock’s – such as the quadruple chin and the studied downward curve of the lips – made me cringe a little (it isn't as blatant as the use of prosthetics to make Joseph Gordon-Levitt resemble Bruce Willis in Looper, but still). In any case there is a touch of contrivance to the casting of Hopkins (such a well-known actor, now almost as closely associated with the playing of diverse real-life figures as Charles Laughton was in an earlier time) in this part - one wonders if the motive was the creation of a lucrative casting coup with the equally respected Helen Mirren, who plays Hitchcock’s wife Alma Reville.

In 1992, Robert Downey Jr played the title role in the biopic Chaplin, but - though Charles Chaplin was among the few movie personalities who was even more recognisable worldwide than Alfred Hitchcock - there was an essential difference in effect. The Chaplin on view in most of that film was not the iconic Little Tramp but the real-life person, whom very few viewers had any direct association with. Which meant Downey Jr had some space to work out his own interpretation of the character, to not be shoehorned into familiar tics and mannerisms. Hitchcock, on the other hand, always appeared in trailers, interviews and TV introductions as “himself” – he performed the same droll gestures (standing about stiffly, saying outrageous things in the most deadpan manner) in the same starched three-piece suit that was presumably attached to his body when he emerged into the world, much like Karna’s kavacha. And this is the figure that Hopkins has been called upon to play. Saddled with such a character – someone who is a vital part of our recent pop-cultural mythology – even a fine actor can be reduced to a pawn.** (The real Hitchcock, who believed actors should be treated like cattle or chess pieces, may have enjoyed this.)

Watching Hopkins as Hitch – or Meryl Streep accumulating a bundle of carefully observed tics and presenting them as “performance” in her imitation of another imposing real-life figure, Margaret Thatcher – one sees signs of things to come. Film history is at a point where we can expect an increasing number of biopics about people who lived recently enough that we have video evidence – and strong memories – of their real selves. And if these biopics are to be made as box office-friendly as possible, one can expect broad simplifications in scripts and shortcuts in portrayals.

A related component is that with important anniversaries looming around every corner, there will soon be no getting away from films about our cinematic past. Consider just the very near future: in 2014 the movie world will celebrate 75 years of Gone with the Wind (75 years, in fact, of that cinematic annus mirabilis 1939), and personally I’d be astonished if a high-profile project about the making of GWTW has not already germinated in the mind of a screenwriter or producer. (What back-stories! What drama! Who could resist the possibilities of the real-life scene – as compelling as anything in Gone with the Wind itself – where David Selznick first laid eyes on his Scarlett, Vivien Leigh, her face lit up by the flames from the burning Atlanta set, at a point when production was already well underway?) 

Two years after that, Citizen Kane will celebrate its diamond jubilee year, and so it will go. Critics often complain about excessive meta-referencing in contemporary cinema – that Quentin Tarantino, for instance, only makes films that are about his film-love – but it is entirely possible that 30 or 40 years from now we will have a film about Tarantino’s life: in other words, a movie about a boy who watched lots and lots of movies and then made movies that paid tribute to those movies. By that time mainstream filmmaking may be closed into a self-referential loop, with little room for anything external.

Yes, of course I’m being cheerfully alarmist. And yes, trailers can be misleading – it’s possible that the complete Hitchcock will reveal a more shaded performance with Hopkins reaching for a poetic truth about the director’s personality, as opposed to caricature. But given that this is a commercial project meant for relatively painless consumption, I doubt it. I will watch the film, but with my fingers splayed over my face and violins shrieking in my head, much the same way that unprepared audiences first experienced Psycho in 1960. In the age of meta-cinema, it is appropriate that a film about the making of a scary film should be... scary.

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** No wonder Ranbir Kapoor said in an interview that he wanted to wait a while before taking on the daunting role of Kishore Kumar in a film. Who can blame him?

 [Did a version of this for my Business Standard film column]

Adventures of an intrepid (and very patient) film critic

[Did a shorter version of this review for Tehelka]

If you’re a weekly film reviewer – working with limited word-space and tight deadlines – and if you spend any time at all thinking about your job, you’re likely to be assailed by questions and self-doubts. In a media-and-Internet-saturated age, being one voice in a cacophony of opinions can be daunting to begin with; even as a firm believer in the power of subjectivity and in the worth of your own views, a time may come when you wonder if the world needs another talking head holding forth (however intelligently or articulately) on such review-proof movies as the latest Salman-starrer or the new Yash Raj Films opus. But how does one escape the obligation to cover the big releases, the films that everyone is talking about – even if that is exactly what makes writing about them seem a little pointless? And what of the small movies that your publication never has space for?

In January 2011 journalist Anna MM Vetticad undertook a mission that most reviewers would baulk at: to watch, and blog reviews of, every Hindi movie released in the NCR that year, even the almost unheard-of ones showing in nondescript halls. The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic chronicles some of the high and low points of that journey. One can imagine such a venture begetting a weighty, in-depth study of the movie industry – and perhaps Vetticad herself will do this someday – but this is not that book, nor is it intended to be. It is a collection of vignettes about the many little worlds that exist between the cracks of what we call “Bollywood”, the bizarre workings of its PR machinery and the struggles of outsiders. It opens a window to a place well beyond the purview of most multiplex-goers (and, I suspect, many professional film writers too) – a place where halls might refuse to screen a film because only one ticket has been sold, or where once-big stars like Jackie Shroff might do unfathomable walk-on parts in barely-directed movies as a sop to an acquaintance.

Vetticad encounters such characters as a Mozambique-based businessman-actor who financed an incredibly tacky film (with the tagline “For the first time on the Indian screen, an actor arises from Africa”) and better-known figures like the director Rohit Shetty, who has a laughably unrefined view of criticism. In an initially funny but ultimately sad experience, she watches Dev Anand’s last film, the disastrous Chargesheet, in an empty hall and calculates that it may have sold only around 2000 tickets nationwide. She discovers a cast of wonderful child actors in an unheralded film called Kaccha Limboo and has a revealing conversation with Onir, director of the sensitive, under-seen I Am. There is even an appendix with the text of the pseudo-scientific concept note for a movie titled Impatient Vivek (the “junk genes” reference is not a comment on the leading man, but it could have been).

The book's chatty, blog-like structure – with detours, ellipses and parentheses – is well-suited to this material, conveying a sense of the many conflicting things going on in the author’s head as she drifts from one theatre to another, and the few forays into overly casual writing (a cry of “Halleluiah”, a sentence beginning “C’mon, doc, I mean...”) are leavened by a basically refined, probing sensibility. As someone who thinks a lot about the issues surrounding reviewing, I enjoyed Vetticad’s reflections on the nuts and bolts of her work, including her uncomplicated explanation for why she never discusses a film with anyone until she has finished her piece. (Personally I’m not that rigid, but I make it a point not to read a review by someone I respect if I am planning to write about the same book or film.) Or the polite tap on the knuckles she administers to people who ask such questions as "Who's forcing you to watch [the bad films]? Why don't you just watch the good ones?" In fact, one of the book’s pleasingly unflashy illustrations – a depiction of the author holding up a magnifying glass to the screen to scrutinise the pimples on Emraan Hashmi’s torso – seems to exemplify the bird-like attentiveness that lay behind this project.

“To my mind this book is a celebration of the small film,” Vetticad says sanguinely, even as she acknowledges that there is little to celebrate about the existence of such movies as the rape-joke-laden Be-Careful. Indeed The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic is most engaging when it throws up eye-popping – and sometimes poignant – tidbits about poseurs and no-hopers as well as people who deserve wider recognition (such as the hearing-impaired Sohail Lakhani, who trained Ranbir Kapoor for Barfi! and also played a deaf-mute youngster in a film called Bubble Gum). It is less engaging when it includes generic interviews with high-profile stars like Vidya Balan and Priyanka Chopra, even if the aim here is to uncover things about how the industry functions. But if you feel that some of these pages might have been better utilised, or that the ending is a little abrupt, it’s a good idea to supplement this book with Vetticad’s blog, where you’ll find even more entertaining nuggets about films with such titles as Cycle Kick, Aashiqui.in and Happy Husbands. None of which, as far as I know, has even a tiny role for Jackie Shroff.

Cross-dressing and murder in Bangalore: on Anita Nair's Cut Like Wound

[Did this review for The Sunday Guardian]

Thrillers or police procedurals often begin with a mood-establishing prologue that describes a crime being committed, before moving on to the investigation; typically in such passages one gets some generic information about the criminal, a shadowy figure about whom nothing too important can yet be disclosed. But the opening pages of Anita Nair’s Cut Like Wound – set in Bangalore over a little more than a month – are intriguing for the amount of detail they provide, for their almost casual build-up to an unpremeditated murder, and for the subtle creation of empathy for the murderer, who is presented as disoriented and emotionally vulnerable.

Right at the beginning we learn that he is a man dressing up as a woman, but by the time the transformation is complete (and the identifying pronoun has become “she”) we also know that this isn’t a whim or a perversion – it is a deep internal impulse, and “Bhuvana” has a real need to be accepted and desired in her new form. And yet, the murder and its cover-up have a savagery that one might associate with male aggression. This dichotomy nicely sets up a story about a killer – and perhaps a city – with multiple personalities.

We continue to encounter Bhuvana at regular intervals through the narrative (in one passage this woman in a man’s body is disgusted by a hardcore porn film that “pandered to the average fantasy of the average Indian man”), but this does not dilute the book’s suspense – we still have to find out who she is, and other subsidiary discoveries will be made along the way. Much of this is done in the company of Inspector Borei Gowda – pushing 50, stockier than he should be, afflicted by melancholia but also sharp and capable of bursts of inspiration – and an earnest but wet-behind-the-ears sub-inspector named Santosh. Their investigation centres on grisly killings with a distinct modus operandi, and on the possible involvement of a shady local corporator and his goons.

Given this premise, Cut Like Wound is required to work first at the level of a well-paced thriller, and this it successfully does. There are stray signs of the pat, hurried writing that characterises all but the very best commercial fiction, as well as a mild tendency towards over-exposition, and a few genre clichés: the cynical officer who is letting himself go to seed but who still has a special quality (referred to here as “super sakaath sense”); the subordinate-cum-foil who has much to learn about police-work and the world in general; the smug superior officers. But Nair achieves a pleasing restraint in the key passages, and nowhere does this show more than in a tense climax, which leaves a few things unsaid and doesn’t try too hard to tie up every loose strand.

However, I also found this book consistently interesting as a commentary on the lives of the sexually marginalised, on the blurring of gender expectations, and the emotional baggage carried by both men and women in a world of role-playing and self-presentation. The inhabitants of the society depicted here – one that includes posh malls as well as seedy underbellies and much in between – are, to varying degrees, struggling with gender roles and perceptions. The main characters include a short-statured man who has spent his life in the shadow of a dominating older brother and an über-macho thug tellingly named King Kong (and associated with a big SUV – described as a “villain vehicle” – that becomes a phallic thing to intimidate other people with), but hints of the larger themes can be seen in even the lives of peripheral characters such as Gowda’s old friend Michael, a widower who continuously feels the lack of his wife’s anchoring presence.

Also in this frame are a community of eunuchs living in the cracks between a supposedly ordered society, transsexuals living in more privileged environments but yearning for a different life, emotionally repressed men who find succour in the worship of an angry mother goddess, and other men who are – with various consequences – in touch with their feminine sides. We get fleeting glimpses of people – young boys wearing flashy earrings in coffee shops, for instance – who flirt with the boundaries simply because they are bored or because they can. And much of this is linked to the many complications of living in an unsettling big-city environment. “One more choice. What was it about urban life that demanded you make a choice every minute, every day?” a character wonders in a relatively mundane situation (he has been asked if he wants mineral or regular water), but the question applies in broader contexts with far-reaching repercussions.

This adds up to a pattern of lives on the edge, and our “hero” is hardly exempt from it. Gowda has his own suppressed impulses, as we see in his vivid fantasies about kicking a senior officer’s face in, and given the book’s concerns one wonders how much this has to do with the absence of a stabilising relationship in his life. He falls with some trepidation into an affair with a woman who is more sophisticated and worldly-wise in many ways – UK-returned, comfortable in spaces like piazzas and malls that rarely intersect with his world – and behind his guilt about being unfaithful to his absent wife may lie a hint of a patriarchal man who needs to be in control, to be the dominating partner in a relationship. His many glum reflections (listening to the happy young couple staying above him, he wonders if he and his wife had ever laughed together so openly; there is a clear awkwardness in his relationship with his teenage son) can be viewed as standard tropes of an aging-cop story, but they also fit well into a narrative about misfits and loners.

In his own way, he is nearly as marginalised as some of the more extreme cases he encounters, and if this book leads to a full-fledged series (as the “Introducing Inspector Gowda” on the cover implies it will) much of its pleasure should come from watching this man patrol the mean streets of his city, dealing with his own urban alienation as well as those of his quarries – and perhaps in wondering how thin that line between mild unrest and full-blown psychosis really is.
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[Also see: this post about Peter Robinson's fine Inspector Banks novels]

Nothing comical about it

[Did this for the Business Standard's "Eye Culture" column. Incidentally I wrote this alongside my review of the Pao anthology, which I will - reluctantly - put up here in a couple of weeks]

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On certain occasions, mostly drunken ones, I get asked what sort of book I find most difficult to review – “literary fiction”, “genre fiction” and “non-fiction” usually being the proffered options. “Comics,” I reply, and watch the questioner sidle away uneasily. “Or rather, graphic novels,” I add if I’m in a kind mood, and then sometimes he shuffles a step and a half back, still looking nervous.

But it’s true. It is much easier to write about a book that is all text than one where drawing and writing operate together in complex ways. Critics make lots of noise about form and content – as well we should – but in a text-only novel, both form and content are expressed purely through words. And words are the reviewer's stock in trade too. This makes for a happy marriage: among other things it is possible to indicate what an author is trying to do by quoting passages and commenting on them. But it's a very different business reviewing a book where words and images act in conjunction (or in contrast) to create a particular effect, or where multiple narratives converge in a single panel. The lazy way out is to discuss the work purely in terms of “what happens” or in terms of its “themes”, but that doesn't begin to do justice to the whole sensory experience.

Little wonder that the reviews I have sweated the most over in the past year – and the ones that I have been least happy about – are reviews of comic anthologies. Recent months have seen the publication of two very good Indian books in this category, Blaft’s The Obliterary Journal (with its mission to "obliterate" conventional literature) and Penguin India’s Pao (put together by The Pao Collective, a group of comic-book artists). These are ambitious, honourable projects and there are few weak links in them – a considerable achievement given that they bring together so many disparate artists, writers, styles and plots. But how does one meaningfully write – in an 800-word space – about a collection of 15 or 20 exercises in visual storytelling, each of which has its own idiom? Invariably, one is reduced to summarising plots, or making a perfunctory observation (one that sounds more knowledgeable than it is) about a drawing style – charcoal, oil painting, mixed media, whatever – being atmospheric and well-suited to the story.

Single-narrative graphic novels pose this problem too, but to varying degrees. Some, like Joe Sacco’s journalistic Palestine, Marjane Satrapi’s coming-of-age tale Persepolis or Art Spiegelman's Holocaust-centred memoir Maus, are driven more by the writing (and the “ideas”) than by the art; but the more rigorous a comic is – the greater the symbiosis between text and drawings – the more difficult it is to write about. Alan Moore, for instance, is a great comics writer who specialises in making fascinating visual and textual connections between seemingly unrelated things: running two or more ideas together, intercutting sequences so that the dialogue from one scene might spill over to supply commentary on another event, casually incorporating phrases and images that acquire a deeper resonance later in the story.

One of my all-time favourite books is the Moore-Eddie Campbell opus From Hell, a dark, multilayered historical fiction that examines the late Victorian era – and the approaching terrors of the 20th century – through the prism of the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888. It is more than 550 pages long, adding up to well over 3,000 panels that range from deceptively scratchy, formless drawings to incredibly detailed and vivid depictions of the squalor of London’s East End. The meters of intensity shift continuously and nearly each image succeeds in conveying exactly the mood required at a particular point in the story: I can open a page at random and feel a cold shiver as I gaze upon a dialogue-less panel showing a poor, ailing prostitute – one of the Ripper’s future victims – leaning against a wall after a scuffle, gasping for breath, an unspeakably desolate expression on her face. Or the mild disappointment, tempered with fatalism, on the visage of another woman when she realises she has to earn another two pence late at night if she is to get any boarding-house accommodation. And here I'm mentioning only two panels that are relatively easy to describe in isolation from the larger narrative.

To do a satisfactory holistic review of such a book, I would probably have to write a book myself (and going by Jean-Luc Godard’s proposal that the best way to review a film is to create a new film in response, it might have to be a graphic novel). And even that may not be enough. As a professional reviewer, nothing can make you feel more emasculated or irrelevant.

Monsters I have known

[Here is the full text of the essay I wrote for The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers, about my horror-movie love. It’s been long enough since the anthology came out, so I thought I’d put it up here. While I’m at it, a reminder that the book contains excellent pieces by many fine writers. More information here]

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It’s June 1988, a summer vacation in London, and I’m sitting in a darkened room with my cousins and their friends, watching a horror film called House. Ten-year-olds, eleven-year-olds huddle together, murmuring, waiting for the scary scenes. One of the adults partying in the living room outside sticks his head in, rolls his eyes dramatically and makes a deep howling sound, but we aren’t impressed; we saw Silver Bullet a few days ago, we know what a real werewolf sounds like.

So one of us gets up and bangs the door shut again, and now the only light comes from the TV set, which isn’t much to speak of, because it’s a dimly lit scene. We hold our breath as someone on the screen (the hero? Is there a “hero” in this film? Or am I thinking in the language of Hindi movies?) slowly walks up to a closet, puts his hand on the knob and turns it. Hanging in the air for a few seconds is the question: will a slimy monster leap out at him (and at us)? Or will he heave a sigh of relief (our cue to do the same), then turn around and find the fiend behind him (in which case our screams will be even louder than if the creature had been inside the closet in the first place)? Or will the jolts be postponed to the next scene? There’s a limited set of options and we know them all, but that doesn’t make the process any less frightening.

Afterwards we chase each other around the lawns, taking turns to play the film’s chief predator Ben (“Big Ben”?), a walking skeleton still grotesquely dressed in the soldier’s uniform in which he died. We were playing in the same garden a few hours earlier, but something has changed since then. The late-evening darkness is stiller than it should be, even though lights are on and the adults are just a few paces away. The rustling of the leaves in the trees and bushes seems full of strange meaning. Distant bird sounds carry portents. My senses are heightened, intensified, the world is suddenly an unfamiliar place.

More than twenty years later, as an adult movie buff with more developed and varied tastes, my favourite horror films continue to have this effect on me. Even when the films themselves are much more diverse in subject matter, style and vintage than the simple label “horror movie” could suggest.

The categories include (among many others) silent films like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (a movie about a madman’s nightmare that, thanks to its brazenly Expressionist set design, looks every bit like a madman’s nightmare) and Nosferatu, the creepiest vampire film I’ve seen. Psychological horror, as in Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf, about a painter visited by phantoms of the mind, and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, in which a young girl left alone in an apartment slowly loses her bearings. Comic-gothic horror (Polanski two years later, with Fearless Vampire Killers, or: Pardon Me, but Your Teeth are in my Neck, about an Albert Einstein look-alike and his bumbling assistant exploring castles in Transylvania) and portmanteau ghost stories, like Masaki Kobayashi’s dazzlingly shot Kwaidan. And yes, gore films too – properly speaking, a different genre, but one that occasionally intersects with the sort of horror I love.

Not all these films achieve their ends in the same way. Many of them don’t have a single jump-out-of-your-seat scene but they have something more invidious, something that crawls back into my mind at the most unexpected times, long after I thought I’d forgotten all about the film.

It has been a long relationship. A few months after that House viewing, back in Delhi, horror films became my major entry point into the world of non-Hindi cinema. Thrills aside, there was something very accessible about them: the accents in American movies were sometimes hard to follow, but horror didn’t depend on dialogue for its effect. When Freddy Krueger leapt out at witless teens in a dark alley, chased them down Elm Street and slashed them to witless teenie-weenies, the visuals – and my senses responding to them – were all that mattered. The camera tracking in on the sinisterly glowing pumpkin (accompanied by the brilliant minimalist music score) during the opening credits of Halloween spoke more forcefully than pages of writing. This was film at its most egalitarian.

And so I rented video cassettes of the Evil Dead and Friday the 13th films, and a low-budget series called Demons, as well as slightly more sophisticated “mainstream” movies (though I knew nothing about those distinctions at the time) like Gremlins and Poltergeist. An education began.

Around the age of 13 my attitude to movie-watching began to change in subtle ways, and this was in large part due to a film that is considered a seminal horror movie, but which I’ve never really been able to think of in those terms. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho encouraged me to take cinema seriously, as an art form with its own methods and a visual language distinct from the words being spoken by the characters on the screen. It led me directly to movie literature and some of its scenes became personal reference points for my subsequent movie-watching (as you’ll see later in this essay). But I was never scared by Psycho in an immediate way. Maybe this was because I already knew all the major plot twists – I had heard jokes about “mummification” from my own mummy, and a friend in the school bus had given me a shot-by-shot description of the final revelation of the embalmed corpse of “Mrs Bates” in the fruit cellar. (Sorry if I’ve spoilt the film for you, but if you’re old enough to be reading this you ought to know these things already; it’s primary-level stuff.) Besides, my first viewing of it was on videocassette, in a well-lit room.

Or maybe it was that I was too moved by the film, that I found a deep sadness in it – “we scratch and claw, but only at the air, only at each other,” says Norman Bates, “and for all of it, we never budge an inch” – and surely a movie that put sad thoughts in your head had to be “more” than a “mere” horror film?

Today, of course, I know better.

Anyway, in the early 1990s the most important book in my life was a fat video guide that had nearly 20,000 capsule “reviews” packed together. The films were classified by a rating system ranging from four stars to one star, with a special “BOMB” rating reserved for the bottom-of-the-barrel movies. (The “review” for a long-forgotten Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton film called Boom was the single word “Thud”. Next to the film’s title was BOMB, in all-caps. Criticism at its tersest, and a good counterpoint to the lengthy film essays I was reading around the same time.)

I carried the guide around in a polythene bag each time I went to the neighborhood video library – in a modest, five-shop community centre in south Delhi’s Saket that would, years later, become the location of India’s first multiplex theatre – and it made many important decisions for me. With one exception. Horror movies were never allowed to fall under its hegemony.

The video-parlour bhaiya looks amused when I extract the thick book from my bag with my free hand – I’m holding open his catalogue with the other – and leaf through it.

“Iss mein duniya ki sabhi movies ka naam hai?” (“Does this have the names of all the movies in the world?”) he asks.

“Haan,” I say without looking up, not wanting to get into a prolonged conversation.

“Hum isska photo-copy karaa sakte hain?” (“Can I get it photo-copied?”) he asks, but I’m not listening. The film I’m looking for is a Hollywood classic from the 1930s. The cassette cover carelessly fitted into the catalogue shows Cary Grant and Irene Dunne – two of my favourite actors – and I tell myself that I’ll take the film if the guide gives it three or more stars. But then something else in the catalogue catches my eye.

Demons 3.

Which has the dreaded “BOMB” next to it in the guide.

The Grant-Dunne film won the best director Oscar for 1937, is rated three-and-a-half stars and considered one of the classic screwball comedies – a genre that I’ve just started to relish.

Irrelevant. Demons 3 it is.

Even at that impressionable age, eager as I was to listen to what the Critics had to say, I had accepted that horror films spoke to me in ways that no film scholar could understand.

If I had to name a single quality that marks my favourite horror films, I’d point to a near-ritualistic intensity, a sense of belonging to a very different world with its own, special set of rules: a good horror film, even one that’s located in a familiar setting and has no obviously supernatural elements, feels weirder and more self-contained (to me, at least) than a science-fiction/fantasy film that really IS set on, say, Middle-Earth or Narnia or the moons of Jupiter. My child-self experienced this in the garden after that House viewing.

(“So you’re saying House was a good horror film?”, you ask, backing away slowly [and thinking to yourself, ‘What’s HE doing editing an anthology of film essays?’] Well, yes, it was. For me. At that age. If I saw it today I’d probably laugh, or worse, yawn. But how is that relevant to anything? By the way, more than 20 years after that evening in London, I turned to the Internet to confirm that bony old Ben really did exist – within the world of the film, that is; that he wasn’t just a manufactured childhood memory. I was thrilled when I discovered a photo of him on a website, looking more or less as I remembered him.)

Opening scenes are always crucial to a film’s success in pulling me into its world. Consider the first five minutes of Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), where an everyday setting gradually turns into something lush and fantastical. As the credits roll, a solemn voiceover tells us that Suzy Banyon, a young American, has come to Germany to join a famous dance academy. We see Suzy walking to the airport exit, and a sense of menace is created by the most ordinary elements: the neon lights in the Departure terminal, a brief glimpse of a woman dressed in red in the distance, the sudden opening of the automatic doors through which Suzy walks (and our simultaneous realisation that a storm is raging outside the airport’s sterile, orderly interiors), the howling of the wind, the water flowing into a nearby drain, the initial obtuseness of the cab driver who takes her to her destination.

Contributing immeasurably to the mood of this sequence is the pounding, punk-rock soundtrack by the band Goblin, with whispers of “witch!” regularly punctuating the score. Suspiria is not especially discreet about the mysteries of its plot: you don’t have to be a student of the genre to figure out that Suzy will find a modern-day witches’ coven at the dance school.

Actually, for the most part this isn’t a subtle film. It’s very arresting visually, and it contains at least three grisly murders filmed with such imagination that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen (isn’t this the opposite of what a horror film is supposed to do?). But unusually for a movie with a lot of gore and blood, it also has graceful scenes that only hint at something unknowable. The barest suggestion of witchcraft, for instance, in the shot where a chambermaid momentarily dazzles Suzy with the light reflected from the silverware she’s cleaning. Or the prolonged nighttime scene in a deserted public square where a blind piano teacher and his seeing-dog sense something evil around them but don’t know exactly what it is (the viewer is given the privilege of a shot of shadows flitting across a building facade – witches? On broomsticks? Or just a flock of birds or bats?). These are the setpieces that stayed with me for weeks after I saw the film. In contrast, when the supernatural is explicitly presented at the end, it’s anti-climactic.

Suspiria would be unimaginable without its lurid colours, but Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (“The Devil Woman”) (1964) is shot in what is usually described as “stark” black and white. Set in medieval Japan, this film opens with an overhead view of a windy grassland, the reeds – more than six feet high – swaying in the breeze. The camera moves closer to show us a large pit in the ground and the next shot is from deep inside this hole, looking up at the sky. The image reminds me of another iconic Japanese horror film, the much more recent Ringu – and its American remake The Ring – apart from evoking the passage in Haruki Murakami’s immense novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle where a man shuts the world out by sitting at the bottom of a well.

But now Onibaba’s opening credits appear on the screen – the Japanese script is menacingly distorted at the edges – accompanied by a soundtrack that’s as mood-setting as the Suspiria score, but more drum-based and minimal, and much more disquieting. In the film’s (almost wordless) first five minutes we learn that the pit is a secret maintained by a middle-aged woman and her daughter-in-law, who live in squalid conditions in this large marshland. Struggling to make ends meet (the son/husband is away fighting in an army), they murder wounded Samurai who stagger into the grassland looking for shelter, and then sell the armour in exchange for meagre rations of food. Meanwhile they also get by with killing rats, dogs and whatever other creatures they can get their hands on, and generally live like wild animals themselves.

So claustrophobic and stifling is the mise-en-scene of Onibaba that one easily forgets it’s set in the same country and roughly the same period as Akira Kurosawa’s classic Samurai movies. Superficial details of time and place scarcely matter anyway; as in so many great horror films, the setting is really the human soul, and it’s always night-time. Atmosphere is created through hand-held camerawork, eerie aural effects (such as bird sounds in the scenes where the young woman, her face rapturous, races through the grass to meet a lover), and of course the setting itself. But for me the unforgettable image is the malevolent face of the old woman, a streak of white hair in her head making her look like a deranged simulacra of the Indira Gandhi photos I remember from the newspapers of my childhood. As the story progresses, my rational mind tells me that she’s a victim – terrified by the thought that her daughter-in-law will leave her to scavenge for herself – but when her piercing eyes fill the screen, the rational mind goes AWOL.

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In a lovely essay titled “Pictures and Secrets”, Ptolemy Tompkins recalled his father’s advice to him when movie monsters gave him nightmares. “Take them out of the context of the film,” said Peter Tompkins (co-author of The Secret Life of Plants), “and place them somewhere else. Control their actions with your own mind.”

At times I try similar mental games with my personal demons. So Onibaba’s “devil woman” reluctantly leaves her grassland at my bidding. I pull Gabbar Singh (bogeymen can come from far outside the genre) out of the sunbaked landscape that was the dacoits’ hideout in Sholay, then lure the rat-like Nosferatu out of his mansion and seat them all at a tea-party together, with a few zombies from George Romero’s films thrown in as foot-servants, and invitations sent out to Michael Myers from Halloween and Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The background music is the sound of Darth Vader’s raspy breathing (I can only hear, not see, him – there was nothing scary about the cheesy black suit!). Unfortunately my mind refuses to take this scenario much further; I’m not sure this lot would have much to say to each other.

However, the films I love have no trouble conversing with each other, even when they are separated by decades, different styles and languages, and an unbridgeable divide in quality. One scene frequently recalls another, setting off a chain of connections in my mind.

As an example, take a randomly selected scene from a film that isn’t strictly a horror movie but which made me shrink into the rickety seat at Delhi’s Shakuntalam Theatre when I first saw it: Fritz Lang’s M, about the hunt for a child-killer in the streets of Berlin.

Early in the film we see a pillar with a notice announcing a reward for the killer’s capture. A little girl bounces her ball against this pillar. At this point the scene is clumsy – there’s no spontaneity in the ball-bouncing, you can tell that the girl is carefully doing what the director is telling her to – but then the shadow of a man comes into the frame from the right. “What a pretty ball!” he says in a childlike voice. Shortly afterwards there’s an aerial view of him buying the girl a balloon while she titters excitedly. Cross-cut to the girl’s mother, waiting for her child to return from school, slowly coming to realise that something is wrong. The sequence ends with a pair of poetic images: the ball slowly rolling out of a hedge, into a patch of grass; the untethered balloon brushing an electric pole and floating away.

So here are three broad constituents of the scene: the girl; the man who approaches her; the ball and the balloon at the close. Whenever I think about any of these elements, other scenes from other films swarm into my head, one scene invoking another, and another, and another, building a monstrous skein of references.

The ball and the balloon adrift. A visual cue for the viewer: something terrible has happened to the little girl, we realise. But what did the man do to her, exactly? A 1930s film couldn’t plainly tell us, but in a way that makes it scarier.

“My son was torn to pieces!” screams the father in the 1980s slasher film Silver Bullet, more than fifty years after M (or five years earlier, in terms of my viewing chronology). In the scene before this, we see a young boy flying a kite late in the evening, in a deserted spot. He hears strange sounds, looks around him nervously; we already know that a ravenous werewolf is on the loose, and we half-cover our eyes. In the next shot we see a policeman carrying the kite, torn, dripping blood. And then the father’s cry.

In most ways that matter, there’s nothing to link M and Silver Bullet (well, except for the important detail that they are both made up of strips of film). Yet, for me, the dual image of the rolling ball and the unrestrained balloon are forever linked to the image of the tethered kite, and to the idea of innocence wantonly destroyed.

The man. The nervous-looking character actor Peter Lorre played the unhinged killer, the shadow on the wall, in M. Ten years later, the same Lorre – a little balder now – played the most scared character in one of my favourite dark comedies. There’s a genuinely creepy scene in Arsenic and Old Lace (assuming you watch it in the original black-and-white, not the hideous colorisation) where a runaway criminal played by Raymond Massey – made up to resemble Boris Karloff as the stitched-together Frankenstein monster – and his doctor, played by Lorre, descend the stairs to a basement. The bodies of 12 men lie buried here, which in itself is not as gross as it sounds: Arsenic and Old Lace is about a pair of sweet, well-intentioned women who do away with lonely old men to put them out of their misery. But the scene with Massey and Lorre going down the stairs, the shadows falling across their faces, the light flickering beyond the closed door they are approaching, gives me the shivers.

The girl: She’s a distant cousin of another young girl playing with a ball, in Federico Fellini’s short film “Toby Dammit”, about a depressive British actor visiting Rome for a movie shoot.

At a press conference, Toby Dammit is asked a string of banal questions. He answers them half-heartedly, crabbily; he looks like he badly needs to sleep. He turns around, seems to see images and people from his past. Dream and reality are blurred – it’s the sort of thing Fellini does so well.

A reporter asks, “Do you believe in God?” “No,” replies the actor.

“And in the Devil?”

Now, for the first time, Toby Dammit looks interested. He leans forward. “Yes. In the Devil, yes,” he says.

“How exciting,” exclaims the questioner, delighted to have hit home, “Have you seen Him? What does He look like? A black cat, a goat, a bat?”

“Oh no,” says Toby, a faraway look coming into his eyes, “To me the Devil is cheerful, agile…”

Cut to an insert of a girl, her face occupying the left half of the screen, grinning diabolically at the camera

“He looks like a little girl.”

Why the actor is haunted by this image I’ll leave you to discover for yourself. But while the little girl in M was a cherubic victim, the girl in “Toby Dammit” is Beelzebub. A role reversal, and a reminder that in horror there are no rules, no character types. Anyone can be monster or prey, or both at once.

But already the connections are overflowing, like the swollen river of blood coming through the slowly opening door in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. As I finished writing the last paragraph, I remembered that the British actor Terence Stamp played the lethargic Toby Dammit, and that my first ever viewing of Stamp was as the evil General Zod in Superman II. It was a supremely entertaining movie, with the inbuilt assurance (as in any Superman film) that things would turn out all right in the end, but it contained one scene that gave me many sleepless nights as a child: Zod and his two minions land on the moon, slay a human astronaut by tearing off his oxygen mask and then kick his dying body gleefully into the distance.

My chief memory of the film today is the utter helplessness of that poor moonstruck astronaut in the face of this assault by Godlike beings. It was so unfair, so far from a fight between equals. Even today, the scene makes it impossible for me to think of Superman 2 as a feel-good movie.

Other connections aren’t so obvious, or maybe they are obvious only to me. I mentioned Psycho being a reference point for much of my other movie-watching. Well, Suzy Banyon’s journey in the taxi at the beginning of Suspiria always reminds me of Marion Crane’s car drive in Hitchcock’s film – a voyage to the netherworld, with lightning heralding the way. It ends with a similar image too: a menacing building (the Bates Motel in Psycho, the dance school here) coming into clear focus through the rain-soaked night. Welcome to Hades.

“Take off your mask,” whispers Onibaba’s old woman to the young Samurai who has just told her that he has a beautiful face underneath the demon mask he is wearing, “I’ve never seen anything really beautiful in my whole life.” The words open a window to a lifetime of struggle and squalor, reminding us of the dire straits of the two women who need to hawk the armour of dead warriors to get food. But it also makes me think about the unhappy world that lies just beneath the surface horrors of Psycho: a world where the now-psychotic Mrs Bates was once a young widow, raising a little boy all by herself, vulnerable to the charms of a smooth-talking man who was after her money; a world where being left alone is the biggest fear of all.

But Onibaba’s Samurai mask is beautiful too, in its own way. It’s just as impassively beautiful as the smooth white face-cover worn by the young girl Christine in Georges Franju’s indescribably lyrical Eyes Without a Face. In this cult classic, the monster not only has a human face, he’s a loving father – a doctor who surgically removes the skin off the faces of kidnapped young women in increasingly desperate attempts to cure his disfigured daughter. Meanwhile she wanders the lawns of the mansion alone, wearing her white mask, communing with the birds and the captive dogs her father has been conducting grisly experiments on.

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Often, when I’m driving alone late at night, I catch myself humming a certain tune without realising it. Then I remember: it’s Maurice Jarre’s spooky score from the opening scene of Eyes Without a Face, in which a middle-aged woman drives a car through deserted streets, occasionally stopping to glance in the rear-view mirror at a shadowy figure in the back-seat. We don’t yet know that the figure in the back-seat is a dead girl whose body has to be disposed of, but the music, the camerawork, the worried but determined look on the middle-aged woman’s face, combine to tell us that something is very wrong.

Driving, I look into the rear-view mirror, half-expecting to see a body slumped in the back-seat, its face inadequately covered by a large floppy hat, but darkened by a trick of the light.

Other scenes from other horror films have similarly infected my life, so that in certain situations and settings I find myself playing out those very moments. While sightseeing, if I see something I want to photograph and reach for the camera around my shoulder, my own gesture makes me think of the split-second shot in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom where Mark Lewis – a disturbed young man whose camera is almost an extension of his personality – reflexively reaches for his shoulder, where the instrument would normally be, the one time his lady friend persuades him to leave home without it.

Or when I’m walking through a deserted car park on a Sunday afternoon, I think of the agoraphobia-inducing scene in Halloween with Jamie Lee Curtis in a desolate neighborhood on a sunny day (who said a slasher movie’s scariest scenes had to be shot in the dark!), dozens of cars parked around her but not a human being in view – and the seemingly omniscient killer Mike Myers presumably watching her from somewhere. It’s a suburban setting – the old rational mind tells me there must be people around, possibly in their houses, looking out from behind the curtains or lolling on rocking-chairs on their porches – but the effect of the scene is just as vivid and intense as if this were Little Red Riding Hood walking alone through the jungle at dusk.

If I’m in a large hall with many exits and corridors, and just a few people moving in and out of the “frame” of my vision, I find myself in the glorious tracking shot from the museum scene in Brian DePalma’s Dressed to Kill, where a middle-aged housewife alternates between being quarry and pursuer to a handsome stranger. But then, if a flash of light – a reflection from someone’s glasses or cellphone – catches my eye, the scene quickly changes and I’m in a late scene from the same film, where another woman is momentarily blinded by the light glancing off the razor blade that a killer holds in his hand. Or there’s the chambermaid from Suspiria again, flashing her silverware at me.

Thinking about it, I realise that hardly any of my favourite scary scenes would be improved by better technology. No other genre can make such a virtue of being shot on a shoestring budget. Once in a while, even incompetence can be a useful thing. A jerky camera or careless editing can be unsettling in a certain context, and how many cases there have been – especially in zombie and vampire films – of mediocre actors unwittingly making a film more effective because their reactions seem so unnatural, so removed from regular human behaviour!

Which is not to say that good, low-budget horror films are “accidents”. Far from it. But finesse and money can spoil their effect. It’s no coincidence that the silent film was particularly well suited to this genre – horror and fantasy films from that era still hold up so well because their creakiness gives them an unmatched visceral effect. Watch the hero slaying an obviously papier-mache dragon in Fritz Lang’s 1922 film Siegfried, a smoky liquid flowing out of the creature’s ruptured sides, and you’ll know what I mean.

Improved technology can dampen the horror-movie experience in other ways, I realise, as I watch a 70-minute “Making Of” feature on my DVD of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Generally speaking, DVD Extras, with their audio commentaries and interview packages and outtakes, have been a boon to me as a movie buff. But the information overload can be deflating when it comes to films that I’d prefer to think of as belonging to a special, self-contained universe.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre exemplifies that sort of movie, and it would be so nice to be able to think of it as something that was made anonymously – perhaps by a cannibal family as a macabre home video – and then deposited into the mailbox of one of the studios, with a note asking them to distribute it. But here, 30 years later, are the crew members – respectably middle-aged, laughing and joking with each other, relating anecdotes. Director Tobe Hooper tells us he decided on the film’s title when his girlfriend at the time exclaimed, “Yuck, I’d never watch anything called that!” (Decided?! And here I was thinking that everything about that film just fell into place entirely independently of such banalities as human decisions.) One of the scriptwriters (this film needed to be scripted?) relates the story behind the dead armadillo we see as road-kill in the first shot. And here’s the actress Marilyn Burns, whom I’d have preferred to freeze into my memory-bank for all time as the screaming, blood-covered Sally trapped in a house of horrors; now she’s gazing into the camera with grandmotherly indulgence. Even Gunnar Hansen, who played the chainsaw-wielding, retarded monster Leatherface, participates in audio commentary.

And now here’s the Onibaba DVD, with colour footage (!) of the tents where the crew lived communally, cosily together during the month-long shoot. Those grasslands no longer look unfathomably creepy and alive, and the people are dressed in modern clothes, even T-shirts. Between shots, they were probably reading Manga or listening to their Sony transistors! For a fan of the film, that’s a blasphemous thought.

Of course, horror-movie DVD extras can be illuminating (as when Dario Argento relates a childhood memory of having to walk down a long dark corridor to his room every night, each half-open door on either side seeming to contain a threat) and I still watch them with enthusiasm. But when I’m alone at home and it’s dark outside and I see shadows and hear little noises (and it’s probably my years of experience in watching horror films that has made me conscious of all these things), at such times I return to the pristineness of those childhood days, the days before I started reading about cinema and discovering back-stories: sitting in a room with cringing children, watching a film that I knew nothing about beyond the images flickering the screen – images that were more real than most things in the real world.

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“Everything means something, I guess,” says a character in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Could he be talking about the tendency of film buffs to read layers and layers of meaning into a movie that means a great deal to them (especially when the film isn’t widely deemed to be worthy of analysis)? Could this be the hidden message: if a film says something to you, touches something deep within you, listen to it, open yourself to it; don’t give in to the hectoring of those who dismiss it as “cheap entertainment”, even if you’re in a minority of one.

After all, horror film are especially vulnerable to genre-snobbery, with viewers routinely putting cerebra before instinct when it comes to assessing their worth. There’s the common phenomenon of people being genuinely affected by a horror film while they are actually watching it, but then emerging from the hall and laughingly dismissing it as nothing more than escapism. I suspect that my love for these movies provided me with a conduit for a basic open-mindedness towards all kinds of films: once you’ve given your heart to a genre that many people are snobbish about, it becomes difficult to be too judgmental about others’ tastes.

There’s the popular story from the earliest days of moving pictures, about the unprepared viewers of a Lumiere Brothers short film who ran out of a Paris theatre when confronted with the image of a train seemingly coming towards them. This is probably apocryphal, but there are other similar, less dramatic stories from that period, and even common sense tells us that the first movie viewers must have experienced quite a few shocks to the system. Today, even the most casual viewers unconsciously process such aspects of film grammar as cross-cutting between unrelated scenes. But in the earliest days, even basic cutting from one image to another (let alone rapid-fire splicing) must have felt otherworldly. To some, it must have been frightening, even demoniac. (Was that puffing train the first movie monster?) Only gradually must viewers have become inured to the violence of the cuts, learnt to stop being scared and love the new medium.

Some of us, though, never stopped wanting to be scared, even as our love for the movies deepened and grew.