EDITOR'S NOTE: Lisa Morton is one of the busiest people I know (check out her credits at the end of this, her final column for Fear Zone), and it's been an honor to run THE EAST IS RED, which she plans to continue on her website. I've learned a lot from every one of these pieces, and hope you have too.

#

Ah, we provincial Americans. We love to imagine that our Hollywood reigns supreme atop the mound of world cinema.

But here's a wake-up call, kids: There's another country's film industry that out-produces (by frigging double ) and out-sells ours. Think Tom Cruise, or Harrison Ford, or Brad Pitt, is the biggest star on earth? Uh-uh. It's a charismatic, handsome hunk named Shahrukh Khan, and his movies are made in India. Or, as some wit dubbed it years ago (by combining Bombay and Hollywood), Bollywood.

I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark here and guess that you've never seen a Bollywood film (and no, Slumdog Millionaire does not count). If you're a Desi - a person of South Asian descent - then you know that more and more metropolitan areas around the U.S. have all-Indian movie theaters and DVD stores, but otherwise you're probably scratching your head about now and going, "Huh?"

So, here's my instant crash course in Bollywood cinema, which you'll need before we can talk about India's horror movies. Remember these five basic rules and you'll do just fine:

1) You've probably heard that virtually all Bollywood movies have singing and dancing in them, and for the most part that's true. The Indians love their musical numbers, and although most of them are love songs, they can take place during bandit raids, riots, or other jaw-droppingly inappropriate times.

2) Because of Indian censorship, Bollywood movies have no nudity, no sex, and no excessive gore. And when we talk about no sex, we're talking not even so much as a kiss on the lips (although busking hands and cheeks is okay). Sure, the actors can basically dry-hump logs in dance routines, but God forbid they should actually touch each other.

3) Bollywood movies love to mix and match genres. It's a staple of the Indian film that, although a story may be primarily set within one genre, it will include heaping hunks of others. This probably dates back to the 1975 classic Sholay, a sort of action film which was also a comedy, a musical, a western, a romance, and the biggest box-office success in Indian movie history.

4) By American standards (and other countries as well), Bollywood production values are cheap, cheap, cheap. Lighting can look like it was set by a one-eyed, color-blind fourth-grader. Hair is often spectacularly nutty, with wigs that imitate nothing human. Actors are frequently so hammy they make our cartoon characters look like they're on downers.

5) The Indians like their movies to be l-o-o-o-o-o-n-g. I'm talking three, four hours. Anything under two is...well, not a Bollywood film.


Okay, now that we've got the basics, let's talk about Bollywood horror.

First off, there's not a lot of it. Despite the fabulous pantheon of mythology and grue to be found in the Hindu religion, fantasy and horror almost didn't even exist in Indian cinema up until the mid-'70s, when a family by the name of Ramsay started making horror films. The movies were produced by patriarch F. U. Ramsay (hey, no jokes about those initials!), written and directed by Shyam and Tulsi Ramsay, and featured seemingly dozens of other crewmembers named Ramsay. They really hit their stride in 1984 with the megahit Purana Mandir, which spawned zillions of knockoffs and imitations; but the run of Indian horror films was basically finished by the '90s, even though the Ramsays' 1990 Bandh Darwaza is considered to be one of their best. The Ramsays' formula liberally combines western horror motifs (vampires, haunted houses, even Freddy Krueger) with eastern design and Bollywood tropes.

There have been a smattering of horror films released since then, most notably the 2003 hit Bhoot, a haunting/possession film with (astonishingly) no musical numbers; but the real heyday for Bollywood horror cinema was the late '80s. (Confession: I couldn't make it through more than an hour of Bhoot , and therefore can't recommend it.)

I'm going to focus on the film that was really the Ramsays' grand swan song: Bandh Darwaza, an epic that is essentially an Indian take on Dracula. It starts with a prologue sequence in which a woman, unable to conceive, goes to the ruined temple atop the ominous Black Mountain, where she is seduced by "the Master", who comes complete with fangs, bright red eyes, a cape (yes, we're talking full-on Lugosi cape, with red lining and everything), and the biggest head ever found on a living human being. Nine months later she gives birth to a daughter, who is claimed by the Master and kidnapped on his behalf; however, her virtuous husband, Pradap, storms the mountain, recovers his infant daughter, and stabs the Master. This all takes over 17 minutes, and then the opening credits start (remember the thing about how Bollywood movies are really long? At a mere 145 minutes, Bandh Darwaza is practically a short).

Flash forward to: Twenty or so years later. The infant, Kaamya, is now all growed up and in love with hunky and hairy Kumar; but, sadly for all, Kumar is in love with Sapna. When Kaamya's attempts to seduce Kumar fail, she goes straight to Black Mountain and finds an evil cult intent on resurrecting the Master, which they do as she watches. The Master and his cult agree to help Kaamya.

Kumar starts having strange dreams, and becomes obsessed with Kaamya; meanwhile, his brother-in-law, Anand, starts figuring out what's going on. The Master soon has Anand's wife in his clutches, and Anand himself follows shortly thereafter. Meanwhile, the Master has decided that Kaamya can never again leave Black Mountain, and we're treated to a musical number in which Kaamya sings about her loneliness, all while she's bound in chains and the Master strides around her, obviously enraptured by that knockout song.

Kumar and Pradap join forces, and - along with Sapna - make plans to return to Black Mountain, intent on rescuing Kaamya and putting an end once and for all to the Master. Unfortunately, Kaamya has made the mistake of realizing the error of her ways, and tried to stab the Master, which resulted in her being impaled on a door studded with spikes (this is the most gore you'll get here, by the way). Our heroic trio raids Black Mountain, and - in one of the more ingenious scenes - they prevent the Master from returning to any of his coffins by putting a crucifix in one, a Koran in another, and using a praNava, or Hindi holy object, to keep him from the third.

The Master and what's left of his cult try to escape (in a horse-drawn carriage - whaHUH?), but Kumar, Pradap and Sapna follow in a jeep. They manage to run down the carriage, and although the Master escapes back to Black Mountain, one of his followers tells our heroes that the Master can only be killed by destroying the huge, funky bat statue that oversees his coffin. Our heroes return to the ruined temple, set fire to the statue, and put an end forever to the evil Master.

Bandh Darwaza benefits from a surprisingly fast pace, an insanely high cheese factor, a genuinely weirdass monster (played by Bollywood monster star Ajay Agarwal, kind of an Indian Rondo Hatton), and a spectacular use of locations. Like some of the '70s Eurotrash classics (say, Tombs of the Blind Dead ) it spends a lot of time in an actual ruined location, and gains a lot of production value from it...which is good, since that offsets some of the ridiculous hair and makeup (love the guy with the world's worst bald cap, and, hey, what's with the skanky little dribbles on the Master's foreheard? I mean, WTF - are they supposed to be veins? I don't know.). The photography is typical for Bollywood cinema, meaning most shots look as if they used one light.

One more caveat: This movie is absolutely guaranteed to offend your feminist sensibilities. Seriously - the women are all schemers or victims, and nearly every female character is slapped by a man at some point. I mean, it's cool that the Indian equivalent of Bram Stoker's Mina is a guy (Kumar), but as for the rest...well, just leave your self-righteous indignation at the door and step into the cheese bath.

However, amidst all the laughter-inducing nonsense, the movie actually does have a couple of surprisingly creepy scenes: One in which the Master stalks his prey through stained glass windows is effective, but best of all is an infamous, brief sequence in which the newly-resurrected Master, staggering and dripping gallons of grave-goo, rapes Kaamya. The rape, of course, is not actually shown, but the goo is stellar.

The Ramsay brothers' films were all but lost for years, but thankfully Mondo Macabro has released three volumes on DVD. Each of the "Bollywood Horror Collection" volumes includes two complete features and some spanky extras. Quality of the transfers is about what you would expect, given that the originals included shots that were sometimes not even exposed properly. But hey...if anything the goofy transfers just add to the overall delightful shoddiness.

I can't say the Ramsay Brothers Bollywood screamfests are actually great examples of horror cinema, but they're enjoyable and undeniably unique. Now here's hoping that someday Indian cinema will give us a horror film truly representative of their gorgeous heritage.

#

Lisa Morton's novella The Lucid Dreaming was recently published by Bad Moon Books, and her first novel, The Castle of Los Angeles (including an introduction by Gary A. Braunbeck) can be pre-ordered from Gray Friar Press. She also recently edited the acclaimed anthology Midnight Walk, and can be found blogging at LiveJournal. She plans on continuing "The East is Red" column at her website, LisaMorton.com.