Horror Fiction in the Global South by Ritwick Bhattacharjee;Saikat Ghosh;

Author:Ritwick Bhattacharjee;Saikat Ghosh;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

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CONJURING AN ATMOSPHERE: A STUDY OF TUMBBAD AS FOLK HORROR

Sakshi Dogra

Horror films often rely on jump scare and gore to produce their affect and effect. Whether it’s the sudden clapping of the hands in The Conjuring (2013) or the unexpected clucking of the tongue in The Hereditary (2018), the startle reflex trigger is a mainstay in most horror cinema. Other motifs include the haunted house, ghosts lurking in the dark corners, possessed and contorted bodies or the stalk-and-murder sequences of slasher movies. Jolt and shock are always accompanied by suspenseful and eerie music. This is not to reduce horror movies to a formula, but instead underscore some dominant tropes that have defined this genre. Where the Hindi language horror cinema is concerned, Ramsay brothers are habitually remembered for movies such as Veerana (1988) and Tehkhana (1986) that epitomised simplistic and sordid stories. Although later movies, such as Raaz (2002), Bhoot (2003), Darna Mana Hai (2003) and 1920 London (2016), were successful, profitable and able to capture the imagination of the audience, their synthetic settings and thin narratives made them tedious.

There has been a recent and visible shift in the aesthetics of horror movies, with the release of Tumbbad (2018). It marks a clear break from the banal and derivative quality of Hindi language horror movies. More significantly, the jolt and shock tactics of Western horror movies are done away with to introduce, instead, an all-encompassing atmosphere of fear and dread, which is monumental in constituting the genre of Folk Horror.This genre allows for the narration of an unusual story which is made of an indigenous folk myth, an engagement with pre-independence reality and the horror of the living. This telling is completely at odds with the horror that is communicated in the conventional Western horror cinema. To plunge further, an atmosphere is produced when lighting, settings, diegetic sounds, cinematography and other formal components combine to produce the look and feel of a scene. Mundane details such as the time of the day, environmental conditions, and visibility make up a visual aesthetic that is the main source of fear. As Gernot Böhme articulates, ‘The aesthetics of atmospheres shift attention away from the “what” something presents, to the “how” something is present’ (Böhme 2017). In fact, it is not what you see but what you sense that dominates this horror cinema. The paper seeks to study the atmosphere of dread, horror and suspense that is dispersed throughout the movie, Tumbbad (2018).

The atmospheric quality is an outlining feature of folk horror, a sub-genre of horror cinema that has found mass appeal in recent times. In an attempt to introduce this contemporary variety of horror, Andy Paciorek writes, ‘So in a bid to answer “what is Folk Horror”, one may as well attempt to build a box the exact shape of the mist; for like the mist, Folk Horror is atmospheric and sinuous’ (2018). First, Paciorek’s usage of the metaphor of mist suggests that it is the environmental element that makes folk horror atmospheric.

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