It’s hard to satisfy the fans of the horror genre because it has been around for long and has masterful works to boast of. Moreover, most of the genre tropes of a horror film are too old that they demand constant reinvention.
In the latest Netflix anthology Ghost Stories, four new-age filmmakers, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee, Karan Johar and Zoya Akhtar, have joined hands again, this time to a quartet of “ghost” shorts, or horror films. No doubt, each of these four directors is distinct voices in their own right and their name evokes certain expectations from the audience. However, out of the total run-time of 144 minutes, the character-defining short comes in story number three — directed by Dibakar Banerjee. This column does not intend to discuss all the four parts of Ghost Stories as this is not a film review. So let us focus solely on Dibakar’s film for a couple of reasons.
Not a typical ghost story
First things first: Dibakar’s film, Monster, is not a typical ghost story that is meant to jump-scare you. Unlike the other three directors of Ghost Stories, he has tried to re-define the genre and use some of its tropes such as man-eating zombies to narrate the horrors that define the contemporary Indian society, its dominant fascist politics and what it will ultimately transform into. The most striking aspect of his narration is, it’s not a loud, in-your-face commentary but a layered narration that caters to the fans of pure zombie films at the cosmetic level and to those who read it beyond the atmospherics by scratching the surface to decipher meaning out of each scene.
On a fateful evening, an unnamed man who we later make out to be a teacher (Sukant Goel) travels by road and walks a long way to take charge in a remote village where he has been transferred to (he tells his wife that an auto dropped him four kilometers away). As he walks in to the village, he realizes that it is destroyed and abandoned with no humans around. A little boy wearing a helmet (Aditya Shetty), ostensibly to protect himself from danger, pulls him over and tells him not to move or utter a word if he wants to be alive. He takes him to a safe house where he and another girl (Eva Ameet Pardeshi) have taken shelter in and feeds him stale food (slices of onion and milk that is several days old), which is all they have in that land for survival. What happens thereon is pure, cannibalistic horror filled with allegory that you can connect to the contemporary politics and its ghastly consequences, with every major facet of it covered with uncanny precision.
As soon as he enters the village Beesgarah (small town), he falls into a pit and gets up covered in dirt. He tries to communicate with the world he left behind but he loses connectivity completely, as if there is a “communication blockade”. As the little boy tells him the rules of the land, or how he has learnt to survive in the village where everyone else have been eaten by the people of Saugarah (big town), we connect to them to our realities. The rules: if you do not want to be spotted and eaten by the man-eating monsters of big town who are roaming around, lie low. Do not move or speak! The zombies are almost blinded that they have lost their ability to see who is who and will spare only those who eat humans like they do!
Fascism does not differentiate people based on emotions and family bonds. Half-way through the film, we see that the little girl in the safe house whose father (Gulshan Deviah) has become a zombie, tries to go near him expecting him to identify and spare her, being killed and eaten by her own father. A few moments later, the boy, who has learnt the rules of survival, walks with a display of fake confidence on his face among zombie creatures chewing the leftover flesh of the girl, as the surveillance state, symbolized by the same zombie who watches every single person on the street closely from atop an electric pole, in an effort to identify the “outsiders” to finish them off. He can pick up any random person who looks suspicious and kill. He jumps down and checks the boy’s face closely to verify that he is not faking it and the human flesh and blood on his face are real. In his effort to look like a real zombie, we realise that the boy has turned into one of them.
I have always felt that politics and cinema freely feed each other. Ever since religion-based identity politics started dominating our political discourse, the stories of hegemony, oppression, victim hood, betrayal, hate, revenge, heroism, golden past, and so on, both real and imagined, have been liberally weaved into the everyday narrative that we consume through the media and our online and offline social interactions. The personality cults of leaders were elevated using PR gimmicks to match the levels of Marvel superheroes. We are told that the diktats emanating from the hate-filled ideology must be considered as the holy verse. The narrative often failed even the basic fact checks but it did not matter to the “audience” called party warriors and voters who are brainwashed and transformed in to mobs in brisk space. They go about spreading the hate further, issuing rape and death threats, alienating people belonging to religions other than theirs, lynching the weak and the vulnerable, and obscuring ethnicity to establish a monolithic world that dances to their tune and pays obeisance to their supreme leader.
Master craft
Masterfully blending symbolism and allegory into his story, Banerjee shows how monolithic, homogenising politics that thrives on conformity and by promoting reverence to symbols of manufactured history, finally grows into a bloodthirsty monster called fascism that eats up every remaining voice of dissent in the society. He not only shows us the mirror, but castigates us for being ignorant, lazy and selfish when the cannibals were spreading their wings of influence and for being blind of the consequences of fascism even after it has been blatantly displaying its true colours.
Dibakar constructs an imaginary land that encompasses all these at a metaphoric plane that hammers the political message hard enough. Have we seen this before? Yes, some shades of it in Leila, Ghoul and Sacred Games. Is it a mere coincidence that such storytelling is possible only on the Web series format? Considering that the men and women behind these creations are accomplished mainstream filmmakers, it does not appear to be a consequence. It is clear that they can think freely and exercise this kind of freedom only when they work without the pressures of the box office, the ruling government and a pliable media.
As the teacher is rescued by the Councilman of the big town accompanied by his henchmen, we realise that rescuers who look like civilized humans and communicates in his language, are the same zombies that he was rescued from. We are not sure whether the horror that he had undergone minutes ago was real or a dream, but what’s in store for him does not seem to be very different. The councilman of big town asks him: “Are you interested in history? Big town was once a touchstone mine. It was the capital of the state. We’ll be great again.”
For the uninitiated, effective reading of films can’t get any simpler than this.
(Dress Circle is a weekly column on films. The author is a communication professional and a film enthusiast. Read his previous works here.)
