Primal fear hits Bollywood! Whodunits are in vogue again with films like Deewangee, Sandhya and Baaz

Subhash K Jha

There was a time when Indian audiences hardly reacted to suspense films. Remember B R Chopra's taut, songless courtroom thriller Kanoon in the 1950s?

The genre really gathered momentum in the 1960s with a spate of films featuring matinee idols like Manoj Kumar and Biswajeet. These included the two films produced by music composer-singer Hemant Kumar's Bees Saal Baad and its followup Kohraa, both featuring Biswajeet and Waheeda Rehman in the lead.

The 1960s' star Manoj Kumar featured in several suspense films, including Woh Kaun Thi, Anita and Gumnaam. Post 1960s, films about killers and other mysterious strangers lost steam.

The last decade has seen a sporadic output of suspense films like Ishmayeel Shroff's Police Public and Partho Ghosh's 100 Days. The other suspenseful films that followed the success of these two films could not quite send a chill up the box-office spine.

After the success of Vikram Bhatt's Raaz, a spooky whodunit and Abbas Mustan's take of Andrew Davis's A Perfect Murder, Humraaz, suddenly there has been a revival of interest in suspense thrillers.

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Now, writer-turned-director Anees Bazmee is all set to unleash a fury of jitters. His Deewaangee features Urmila Matondkar (who featured in the suspense thriller, Kaun), along with Ajay Devgan and Akshaye Khanna. The latter also featured in Humraaz.

While Akshaye played crooked in Humraaz, he is more straightlaced in Deewangee, said to be inspired by Gregory Hoblitt's Primal Fear. "You could say it is partly inspired by that source," agrees Urmila, but adds, "You cannot remake a hardcore thriller like Primal Fear without softening the blow."

A major impediment in constructing believable thrillers in Hindi is the image of the stars. In Hollywood, casting major stars as victims and killers in whodunits is nothing new. In Bollywood, producers have to be careful of the actor's image while casting him in a negative mould. In Khoj, the Hindi adaptation of To Chase A Crooked Shadow, Rishi Kapoor played his wife Kimi Katkar's killer. The film bombed and the actor stuck to conventional roles.

The current breed of stars are game to playing dark roles. Their willingness to discard their images has infused new vigour in the genre of suspense thrillers.

Right after Anees Bazmee's Deewaangee, there is Sangeeth Sivan's Sandhya. It is the story of a psychotic killer on the prowl, written by the late actor Amjad Khan’s son Shadaab Khan.

Raveena Tandon starred earlier this year in the whodunit Soch, and says she enjoyed the chilling ambience of Sandhya. "Thrillers have no repeat value. Once the audience knows who the killer is, there is no charm left. Sandhya will still shock viewers."

Raveena's colleague Karisma Kapoor is also busy screaming on the sets of the thriller Baaz, where she plays an enigmatic stranger grappling with the attention of three men Suniel Shetty, Jackie Shroff and Dino Morea. Karisma is thrilled to bits since she has never done a suspense thriller before.

The provocative genre is growing in popularity since suspense films take relatively shorter period of time to be completed.

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