Opinion | Stree 2 To Munjya, Indian Horror Is Seeing A 'Folk' Reawakening
NDTV
On August 26, Stree 2 crossed Rs 402 crore collections at the global box office since its release on August 15. Starring Rajkummar Rao, Shraddha Kapoor, Pankaj Tripathi, Abhishek Banerjee and Aparshakti Khurana, the horror comedy, a sequel to the 2018 film Stree, has become the second-highest-grossing Bollywood film of 2024. Right before Stree 2, another horror comedy, Munjya, had become a sleeper hit, raking in around Rs 132 crore worldwide. What made these films click with the Hindi audience as compared to big star and big-budget films like Maidaan and Bade Miyan and Chote Miyan?
India has a deep love for the horror genre. Thanks to our diverse culture, people across the country are brought up listening to and reading culturally rooted Indian folk tales and stories, like Vikram aur Betaal. Amar Chitra Katha comics and books, which included Indian mythology and humour, were a staple diet for kids. The Indian audience loves stories of ghosts. It's thus not surprising that filmmaker Mehmood's Bhoot Bungla was a superhit in 1965 and officially the first horror comedy in Hindi cinema. The Ramsay brothers (from the 1970s to 1980s) were known for their horror stories in Hindi, though the later years only saw disasters in the genre. Bhoot (Ram Gopal Varma) and Raaz (Vikram Bhatt) in the early 2000s were like a shot in the arm, but a short-lived one.
However, over the last few years, the genre is seeing a strong revival, as seen in the success of Bhool Bhulaiya, Stree and so on. Bollywood celebrities have also discovered the power of horror-comedies. Interestingly, South Cinema has always had a fascination for horror films. Malayalam film Manichitrathazhu (1993), for instance, was remade in Tamil as Chandramukhi and in Hindi as Bhool Bhulaiya, and these were blockbusters across all languages. This year, Romanchan and Bhoothakaalam were hits in Malayalam, while Aranmanai 4 scored big in Tamil.
