He gave us Phoonk in 2008 and he's back with Agyaat in 2009. Director Ram Gopal Varma analyses what makes us break into a cold sweat

"Recently someone asked me, 'Why do you make horror films?' I said, 'I love scaring people.' Just to put a group of people in a theatre, close the doors, shut out the lights and scare the hell out of them obviously gives you a kick. When I watched Bhoot at Eros, I stood somewhere in the back. When the girl Manjeet appears under the staircase, the whole theatre jumped up. Imagine the kind of high you get as a director it's almost like a mass hypnosis was conducted on them!

"A film is divided into a story, drama, characters and the usage of the background score, camera and sound. All the applications come to a peak in a horror film. That's because you're arousing an emotion, fear, without anything actually being there. This is why you see in Hollywood that many top directors have dabbled in horror.
(Francis Ford) Coppola made Dracula, Steven Spielberg made this little known TV film called Something Evil and so did Brian De Palma (Carrie, Sisters). The whole point of making a horror was about using the tools of the medium.

My first horror moments

"I remember the first time I saw The Exorcist in a town in Andhra Pradesh called Rajahmundry. I was about 20 years old. I travelled for about 60 kms in a bus from one town to another because at the time, that was the only place with a theatre screening it. I couldn't sleep for a week after seeing that. When I came back home, everyone looked like a ghost to me, even my cousins.

"The first horror films I saw were that of the Ramsay Brothers, but I also watched those Dracula movies. The two scariest films I ever saw were The Exorcist and the Ramsay Brothers film Do Ghar Zameen Ke Neeche, which I saw when I was much younger. I remember getting off the bus and there was a graveyard in the middle of a short-cut to my home. But just to avoid that, I walked three kilometers extra. My biggest revenge on what the Ramsay Brothers did to me was when years later, they came to me and asked me to produce a horror for them!

"Horrors require performances far greater than ordinary films. The audience is reacting to the actor on screen. The actors have to make those scenes believable. The blood coming from a tap is the same, but the expression of the actor is what makes one a high-grade horror and the other a low-grade one. That's why The Blairwitch Project looks high-grade, because of the performances. If you only looked at production values, it's probably the cheapest horror ever made. The reason why even children look at TV horror shows as comedy is because of the acting.