Let’s start with a modern horror story. When the first season of Sacred Games dropped in 2018, there was a surge of hope for a newer dawn of storytelling. The OTT space felt primed to embark on go-for-broke adventures that Hindi cinema and television couldn’t: take risks, platform untapped talent, challenge the mainstream, exhibit genres and languages. But the rapid and predatory privatisation of this medium meant that – save for a handful of titles every year – the hope remained a mirage. Studios, flowcharts, eyeball races and formulas turned the streaming space into a land of the living dead, where art became the flesh-and-blood exception and not the zombified norm.
Every now and then, a show comes along to encapsulate those early days of promise. A show so daring that its very existence evokes flashbacks of a survival thriller – one where it escapes the cracks of a system designed to prey on its freshness. A show that marches to its own beat without caring for catch-phrases like “bingeable”, “second-screen viewing” and “addictive”.
Khauf (“Fear”) is the kind of show that Indian streaming was always supposed to champion – it’s ambitious, original, inventive, messy and an eerily layered reminder of how supernatural stories are rooted in the fear of natural living. It’s fitting that the two titles to resist conventional pattern this year – Black Warrant, now Khauf — are created by Vikramaditya Motwane and Smita Singh, the co-director and co-writer of Sacred Games respectively. This may not be a second beginning, but it’s a reimagined one.
