Horror is in, from books to web shows and films, to haunted house tours, paranormal investigators on YouTube, and video games. Sunday mid-day asks creators: Why do we like to scare ourselves?
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As a child, Sarbajeet Mohanty often experienced paranormal phenomena in the houses his family moved into across India. At first, he brushed it off as childish fear, but the encounters kept returning, too vivid to ignore. Eventually, he decided the only way forward was to confront the darkness head-on.
“Finally, I asked myself, ‘What am I fearing?’,” he tells us over the phone. Explaining that people are often afraid of paranormal activities simply because of the fear of the unknown. “I thought, if I start getting to know this better, my fear will reduce. My partner Pooja came from a similar space of wanting to know what’s unknown,” he says.
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This prompted Pooja Vijay and Mohanty to turn paranormal investigators and establish Ghost Encounters in 2014. The idea was to scientifically debunk myths and superstitions around what we are conditioned to assume as horror. They later took this onto YouTube and Instagram. “If you look at most ghost videos that surface, it seems eerie or paranormal because of the camera angle, or it’s an AI-generated clip or image. People’s idea of horror is drawn from the media, but in reality, possession doesn’t take place as it’s shown in films, nor does the possessed body rotate mid-air,” says Mohanty. It’s why his content focuses on debunking what is haunted and what isn’t, and draws an audience of realists who are fans of horror out of curiosity about the unknown.
Sarbajeet Mohanty and Pooja Vijay
But that dramatisation of horror is what makes the genre popular in films, web series, books, podcasts, and more recently, even while doomscrolling on Instagram. From our conversation with Mohanty, it’s easy to gather that what makes horror click is not fear — it’s curiosity. Horror is our response to that fear of the unknown.
Aditya Sarpotdar, Arnab Ray, Gaurav Desai and Smita Singh
As that curiosity of the unknown amps up entertainment, Mohanty and Vijay conduct Ghost Encounters Tours across Lonavla, Goa, Mahabaleshwar, and other parts of India. A group sets out together to a haunted building or forest with the idea of encountering the paranormal or supernatural, but also to put that curiosity to rest.
For the ones who aren’t curious enough to venture to haunted locales, podcasters and content creators offer the dose. “People seek that adrenaline rush; I think humans want to know what’s around us and feel the fear, but don’t want to explore by themselves,” says Aishwarya Singh, who, along with Aryaan Misra, hosts Bhoot Busters and The Desi Crime Podcast. Singh and Misra first began their true-crime podcast as university students. But as true crime often overlaps with supernatural or paranormal instances, they launched Bhoot Busters. “We wanted to answer if this exists. In season one, we covered six locations. Bhoot Busters is more investigative and requires a lot of groundwork; that’s the only reason why we haven’t had a season two yet. For now, we read the letters that our community sends us about the paranormal experiences they have had,” says Singh. The duo has also written a book, Desi Crime, published by Pan Macmillan India, which covers 20 stories that include honour killings, cannibalism, corporate espionage and cultish conspiracies.
Horror tours conducted by Ghost Encounters attest to the popularity of the scare genre. Pic/Ghost Encounters Tours
This interest in horror, though, is not newfound; it’s simply growing. Indian horror films in 2024 ruled the box office. Stree 2 entered the R200-crore club in just four days. Munjya earned Rs 125 crore, Shaitaan earned R213 crore at the box office worldwide, Malayalam film Bramayugam earned R58.2 crore and became one of the highest-grossing Malayalam films of 2024, and Tamil film Aranmanai 4 earned Rs 98 crore at the box office worldwide. In 2025, we are anticipating the release of three Indian horror films, and more are likely to seep into 2026’s early year releases.
Barring films, horror ruled in other media, too. Kamla, a video game by Indian indie studio Mad Mantra Games, received 10 million (1 crore) downloads and garnered notable success despite being a low-production quality game. The game is set in 1980s India and follows classic horror tropes: a haunted mansion, a chudail, and a priest performing an exorcism. Players have to find a way out of an old mansion as a priest tasked to exorcise a woman who has been possessed. A new horror game, Project MKD, is next and will be added to the Kamla universe.
Aishwarya Singh and Aryaan Misra
In the world of books, 2024 saw notable titles getting published or gaining traction. These include Ghosts of the Silent Hills (Hindi) by Anita Krishan, Woh Kon Thi? by Rupa Srikumar (Hindi Edition), That Night: Four Friends, Twenty Years (Hindi Translation) by Nidhi Upadhyay, and Shakchunni (English) by Arnab Ray.
But why are creators excited about the genre? “For me, horror is a way of dealing with the anxieties of the world. It’s why a lot of people listen to horror podcasts before they sleep, it’s comforting,” says Smita Singh, writer of Amazon’s web series Khauf, which released in April this year. “I write what excites me,” she says, adding that she watched a lot of horror titles but did not enjoy them much. “There is a lot you can do with horror. When you read horror, it’s so much better. Literature does so much more; it tells you so much about the person you are and what you can explore with horror.”
Arnab Ray, writer of books like Shakchunni, The Mine, and more, has a similar interest. “I’m not interested in conventional horror. For me, horror needs to pertain to human conditions,” he says, adding that our lives are full of horror: disease, guilt, health, work, or something else. “It’s anything that you don’t expect or don’t like dealing with. And, we seek it to be scared or experience fear in a comforting way.” Ray cites The Shining as an example, explaining that it taps into deeper human emotions. “It’s about the protagonist’s failure, because that’s real horror.”
Ray’s next book, The Bucket, will be released in January 2026; and will explore the horrors of the midlife crisis in two worlds.
Shubham Rajanwar and Raaghav Dar
Aditya Sarpotdar, director of Munjya and the upcoming horror-rom-com, Thama, says, “This worldbuilding, where you take from folklore, myths, or pop culture… I have always been fascinated with this. It’s cinematic to create these characters. Munjya was a creature film that I was attempting to create, to now creating Thama, a Vampire film. There has always been an imprint of all these fantastical genres growing up, and then to attempt it with my narrative or folklore references is what draws me.”
“When I design a horror game, I’m thinking, what’s the scariest thing to do?” says Shubham Rajanwar, founder of Mad Mantra Games, when we ask him how he ensures that the play doesn’t get too scary, as games are more interactive than films. “As the game proceeds, the horror intensifies, but we provide solutions and brighter areas in the game, so that the horror is paced out.”
For the audience, horror and its sub-genres entertain. Rajanwar says, “We live in the world of streamers. So for an audience watching a gamer stream, it’s entertaining. While playing a horror game, the gamer has shocking reactions or falls out of the chair. All this makes for better content for entertainment.”
Sarpotdar says that he aims for his movies to be family entertainers. “So with Thama, which is a horror-romantic-comedy, I know what my threshold for each of these genres is going to be. Munjya was more kid-friendly, and my characters were innocent. In Thama, the tone and the core emotion are romance,” he says.
Amazon’s newly released Andhera is an ambitious genre cocktail. It blends elements of horror, psychological thriller, science fiction, and urban myth. “Everyone’s finding this blend unique and new,” says the show’s writer, Gaurav Desai. “The audience has to guess where it’s going: It’s a murder mystery, there’s a psychological element, and a supernatural element to it. We wanted to see what the response would be, and we are glad people are recognising the newness of it.”
But in terms of everything one can do with horror, Smita Singh feels we have still to see an evolution of the genre. “The genre can do so much better than what we have right now. In writing, what Stree did as a horror comedy was lovely. The fact that these two men [Raj and DK] sat down and decided to laugh at spooking men is such a delicious thought. But I believe we can do a lot more with horror than we have done so far. Raat [film by Ram Gopal Varma], for me, is a favourite. I think it holds up for me even today.”
Desai and Raaghav Dar (director of Andhera) say that producers now have more belief in the creators to experiment with horror. “It’s easier to make a horror
comedy, but it’s so easy to go wrong. One laugh where you didn’t intend to be funny can kill it. But I think the craft, prosthetics, VFX, and technology
have all now caught up with the storytelling. So there’s more confidence in the making of horror,” says Dar.
“Horror is also a genre where it’s imperative to keep innovating,” says Desai, and Dar adds, “Even the best horror filmmakers can’t find success doing the same.”
1 crore
Number of times Kamla, a horror-themed video game has been downloaded
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