Khauf, the gripping new eight-episode miniseries streaming on Amazon Prime Video, is the latest take on Indian horror. What makes the show special is how it gives shape to the ‘fear’ not just of the supernatural, but of male gaze and aggression, both physical and psychological. We spoke to writer and creator Smita Singh and director Pankaj Kumar about how Khauf dives deeper into the psyche of the oppressed through the genre of horror.
“A lot of it is there in the script itself. The hidden palpable fear. You can feel it while reading what Smita has written,” says Pankaj Kumar, responsible for shooting and directing the series. He’s also the eye behind Ship of Theseus (2012) and Tumbbad (2018). Structurally, Khauf weaponizes silence, gaze, and spatial tension to bring across the more visual aspects of fear; but the real fear runs deeper like an aching nerve brought to light every instance that a man graces the screen. Such is the story being told by Smita Singh, the mind behind Sacred Games (2018) and Raat Akeli Hai (2020). “I think, horror was this great way of looking at how women come to terms with violence, how women come to terms with the eyes on them, with stalking, with everything that tries to erase them in some ways,” she tells me.
The Delhi in Khauf where Madhu, the bright eyed almost college graduate escapes to from Gwalior is harsh and oppressive, a larger cage with more frightening horrors, heavy with the threat of eve teasing, assaults on the bus, men following women through dimly lit streets and an underlining of rape. This oppressive male environment is at the heart of Khauf, a sociological horror deeply intertwined with the more sinister supernatural one.
Writer and creator Smita Singh on male aggression, psychological trauma and survival
I ask Singh why it was so important to bring alive this aspect of society in such a raw representation. “You can’t escape it, because in our society unfortunately the way our systems are, you can’t be safe. You’re not safe in your school, college, home and you step out and it’s even worse outside,” she explains. “What do you do? you start to erase your personality, you start to take up less space, however less space can you take inside that dingy room, inside your bed, inside your head,” adds Smita.
That’s what led to the birth of the wide eyed and naïve character of Madhu, the protagonist of the series portrayed by Monika Panwar. She still struggles to look at her own sexual trauma in the eyes while settling into a dingy room in a women’s hostel in Delhi. Meanwhile her partner, her only true companion in the city also struggles to come to terms with her past rape; and the only other friend she has is dating a man who Madhu starts to suspect may have been one of the perpetrators years ago. While battling this inner turmoil, she unsuspectingly lands at the center of a haunting at her working women’s hostel. “I wanted to fuse both the psychological and what is really happening outside the realism of it, to give a sense that what fear she’s experiencing doesn’t just stop at the gates of the hostel, you know? It permeates through your psyche. It’s not even fear, it’s like a constant sense of the space doesn’t belong to me,” Smita explains.
The ghost or the spirit that haunts Madhu’s new room too is a semblance of male aggression, the result of a assault attempt turned awry. The result is the sinister room number 333, and the four other haunted girls living on the floor, bound to the hostel. As the story unfolds, with a constable looking for her missing son who is inexplicably tied to the hostel, a witch doctor who sacrifices the soul of troubled women, and the history of the haunted room unfolds; the different narratives and plotlines come together in what is a story of male aggression, the oppression women face on all fronts, and how these battles are not just psychological but physical as well.
“Madhu goes through the ringer, we put her through everything. Where she’s completely hollowed out, something dreadful is growing inside of her, it’s almost like cannibalizing her from inside. What happens towards the end is that push down to the bottom, when she is forced to look at what she has not been trying to look, she’s been trying to lock away; is when from inside of her it comes out that ‘No I have to throw this out of me, I cannot submit to it.’ That is where her rage and courage come from,” Singh explains.
And while the bloodbath of a climax comes to a rather positive end for Madhu and the girls, I ask Smita if it is in sorts, a reclamation of her space? An unsaid win for female solidarity over male oppression? She denies it, stating that that would be too optimistic. “She throws him out of herself and she’s free of him, but she can’t be free of the trauma that’s touched her. She has been through it all. She’s not the wide-eyed naive girl, anymore she’s an all-knowing woman of this world who says, ‘You died, you were so powerful behind your mask, behind your facade with all these men around you and now you are gone but I have survived’,” she explains. “What that survival is, it’s not going to be the naive optimistic survival, it’s going to be the survival of a woman who knows, and you dare not cross her again,” she adds.
The result of Madhu’s internal and external tousles is one of the most promising genre shows Indian streaming has seen in a while. Expertly weaving the genre of horror into a societal proclamation, while also not taking away from the fear factor, Khauf is ticking all the right boxes. I ask Singh, why horror to tell this story?
“Horror is so exciting, there is all the adrenaline rush, all the spooks and the thrills; that’s a very superficial level at which it exists. The other thing that it can do as a potential genre is that it can talk about things that are the residue of everything that we don’t look at. That’s inside you; that we don’t examine, that we don’t turn over, that we don’t really watch. People when they watch they’re trying to discover something. When you open that door what are you going to find? You go deeper down this basement what are you going to discover. So, there is some element of what is grotesque and what cannot be looked at which is hiding in the basement which I think is open to so many interpretations,” notes Smita.
Director and DOP Pankaj Kumar on immersive horror, and the authentic representation and reception of trauma
While Khauf has been catching all the eyeballs for the way it navigates female oppression and male aggression through the genre of horror, the cinematic prowess that breathes life into the series is of equal importance. “As a filmmaker, it was my responsibility to translate whatever our characters were feeling. The idea was to keep the filmmaking part of it simple and to understand what the tone of the entire show is going to be. Once you have figured out that tone, then after that everything falls into place. The way you’re going to design your shots, the way you’re going to make your actors perform, at which pitch they’re performing, and you take care that your filmmaking is devoid of ornamentations, anything that distracts you away from the central thread of the theme,” Kumar tells us.
Watching Khauf I can almost see myself in the dreary, dusty streets of Delhi, where an oppressive veil of sinister energy lingers. It’s almost like the viewers themselves are living out the life of Madhu as she navigates the stuffy city. Kumar explains that the magic is in the details, “It’s very important that even for the smallest of the things, the spaces we are designing, the places our characters are navigating throughout, there is nothing that is unnecessary in it. We work with the absolute essential elements, which I think works in making it quite engaging,” he shares. “The idea is to make it so immersive that the audience should feel that they are a part of it and they’re not just observing it as an audience in a theatre watching actors perform on the proscenium. The idea is to break the proscenium, bring the actors right into the middle of the audience instead of making them perform at a distance. So that’s how the language of the camera works and that’s how the construction of the scenes work,” he elaborates. And that’s the sort of effect Khauf seems to offer, a horror so real and raw that you can almost imagine it happening.
What’s special about the show is the realism that it offers – and by realism I don’t mean more uncensored depictions of rape but rather a more nuanced look at the cause and effects of an event like rape. Khauf doesn’t shy away from talking about sensitive topics and trauma in real life scenarios. “I think Smita takes, through her writing takes people in the deep psyche of the trauma itself. That’s what I think the screenplay does very well, which other, clichéd depictions of rape touch them at a very shallow level and from perspectives of non-trauma. People are afraid to go there, to go to the depths of this tremendous pain and Smita’s writing is fearless in that regard. That’s why people are not able to gaze away, because the screenplay doesn’t shy away from giving you a depiction of trauma and pain and victimhood. It takes you very deep into the minds of the character and that’s what I think it does differently,” says Pankaj Kumar.
The said depiction surely keeps one hooked, I for one sat through the entire 5 hour something series in one sitting: unable to look away. “That is the desire of every filmmaker to make their show so gripping that you just can’t stop watching!” Kumar smiles when I tell him the same. But it’s not just me who’s been touched or affected by the show – the audience reviews speak for themselves. “Why are people responding to it like this? I think because it is because the craft has gone into making it engaging at every level. Whether it’s in the writing, or it’s in in the picturization of it, the direction of it, later in the editing sound. The struggle is always what you want to say but then are you able to say it the way you want to? So, I think that I would count it as success that even if we kept it stark and realistic in our treatment people are responding. The fear that people generally have that if you make something that disturbing and realistic and stark it won’t work, I think that makes us happy that it did work and it did touch the specificity of it and the realism of it. Yet, it didn’t escape people they actually embraced it,” he shares.
The question remains whether the Indian audiences are ready to be disturbed by what’s real rather than what’s imagined? Fear, especially when centered around the female body and mind, is often culturally processed in Indian storytelling more subtly; Khauf challenges that notion. Showcasing the grotesque truth that many have experienced, to a larger audience of which many be uninitiated. “I think that’s already happening. The Indian audience is responding quite aptly to the show and the response is more positive than I expected, especially from men. I thought women are definitely going to respond to the show. But the response from men has been quite positively surprising. I think that’s a good thing. Smita is very pessimistic, but I think I’m optimistic that, if men can become better through realizations of what’s actually happening, it will be a better place,” says Kumar.
