Tuesday Horror Film
The proposal
was placed before the Residence’s Empowered Committee for Cinematic Expeditions
(RECCE) the day before and approved by a 3-1 majority. A horror film was chosen
for breaking the 16-year drought. I would have preferred a courtroom drama or a
thriller, but a horror flick is good enough, I suppose. We opted for the night
show, the better to relish the horror. The intimation was given to me at 8:45,
I said yes and we were out of the house by 9:15. My wife preferred to stay at
home so she could continue her practice with the kitchen knife.
The mall is a
stone’s throw away from my house and we were at the counter picking up our
tickets with about thirteen minutes and forty three seconds to spare. I took a
look around. Quite a decent sized lobby with a few single sofas placed one
behind the other. There was a counter selling some liquid refreshments of the
aerated kind, a machine made coffee, and snacks consisting mainly of popcorn in
different flavours. But no peanuts. And no “murukkus”, the curled and twisted
crunchies. A bit of a disappointment. I like to munch on a murukku during shows
but am careful not to crack down on it during courtroom dramas when listening
to the dialogues is all that matters. But you can’t crunch on corns that pop. I
naturally refused the offer of popcorn.
Anyway, we
went inside and found our seats without much difficulty. I sat in the middle,
flanked by my two daughters. Slowly, the theatre started to fill up. It stopped
when it was about a quarter full. There was a brief lull and then the lights
dimmed and the screen came alive with a crackle and a burst.
The first
trailer to come on was something by someone who had a long name. The letters
rushed at me and stopped just in front of my eyes! I had to rotate my head from
left to right to read the name covering the entire width of the screen. GUL and
MAR flanking the two ends, with SHANKU in the middle. Reading from left to
right, GULSHAN KUMAR. Before I could read the rest of it, it changed. Then they
showed someone in such close up that I could almost count the hair on his
eyebrows. And the sound was something else. Every syllable cracklingly clear!
It plays tricks with you so, swirling around like that!
Sixteen
years!
There were
some three trailers and one of them was repeated. And then there flashed a
message on screen to stand up for the National Anthem. I nodded to myself in
agreement. And my daughter, the one on my right, told me that I must stand up
NOW. Okay. I stood up. We all stood up. I sang the National Anthem to myself
and it sounded good. In the days when I went to movie theatres regularly, the
National Anthem was always played at the end of the show.
The movie
starts quite quietly, showing a chap in his workshop picking up an eye, a fake
one, not a real one of course, and fixing it to the face of a doll and then
going out and walking across to his house to scare his daughter and tickle her.
Then his wife, the daughter’s mother, joins him and they both tickle her, the
daughter. Then the scene changes to morning and they are off to church. After
church, they are met by a friend who wonders when his supply of dolls would be
delivered. Sort of setting the stage for scariness to appear.
The first
scary scene is in the beginning. Later on there are some more. Quite a few, in
fact. This house has lots of doors, which creak when you try to open them.
There are windows which are all curtained. There are lots of dark corners where
you can see “things” if you keep your eyes open. As the film progresses, I try
to anticipate the scary scenes. When a corner is being turned, I try looking
around it for the lurking scream. At one stage, my daughter, the one on my left,
follows the scream with her own authentic version, which is echoed by a group
of young men down the line. This is followed by a collective sigh of relief and
canned laughter. At the end of another protracted scary scene, the much
anticipated scream doesn’t come. Instead, INTERMISSION is flashed on the
screen.
My daughter,
the one on the left, steps out to the lobby and returns with a huge tub of
popcorn popped with cheese. No masala peanuts or murukkus. These theatres must
allow murukkus, especially when they screen horror films. Imagine a prolonged
moment of tense silence followed by the crack of a murukku being crunched! Good
fun, it would be! I had to settle for popcorn.
The movie
continues from where it left off, with scary scenes tumbling out one after
another. I start munching the popcorn, much as I detest it. There’s no crunch
and no one is distracted. From my right, I hear a voice muttering about
children going off where they shouldn’t and not being careful and why the idiot
adults accompanying them don’t stop them and so on and so forth. The children
on the screen, of course, are hardly listening. They don’t even hear the shouts
from the audience to them to look behind and see that thing that is it creeping
up behind them and take immediate evasive action. As the closing credits roll,
the crowd filters out. We stand up and watch the screen, looking for
interesting titles and names. We are the last to leave.
Dolls are a
good theme around which to build horror stories. The scope is quite large.
We descend
gingerly to the basement parking lot and I am thinking that sixteen years is
quite a record! Quite an outing this was!
We got into
the car, locked the doors and closed all windows. I started the engine, paid the
parking charges to the doll seated behind the counter at the gate and sped homewards
without looking back.
As I turned
into the main road leading to the street where I live, I suddenly saw an old
man clad in tattered clothes standing right in the middle of the road, with
what looked like a largish doll on his shoulder, legs twined around his neck
and hands clutching his head. The doll’s lips were pursed, as if it was
whistling a jolly tune. I stood on the brake, but could not stop the car. The
old man just stood there looking at me through sightless eyes without budging.
The doll too was watching unblinkingly. It was hopeless. As the car was about
to hit him I braced for the impact, but none came. The car just went through
him! I looked in the rear view mirror but there was nothing there! I flew on
without stopping to find out.
As we reached
home, we saw another eerie sight. The gate was opening by itself! Not wanting
to stop, I entered the driveway in a smooth movement and parked my car. The
gate closed behind us and I could see what appeared to be the face of a doll peeping
out at us from around the closing gate. It, the face, not the gate, disappeared
before I could go and thank it properly for the kind courtesy. The main door
opened with a creak and we quickly got inside the house. I locked the door
securely.
Apart from
these rather unexpected, unusual and unnerving incidents, nothing untoward
happened.
My wife was
just putting away the kitchen knife as we entered. Feeling a bit peckish after
all the action, I asked her if there was anything left at home to eat. And
guess what she replied?
“Rice and
doll”.
©Shiva Kumar 23 August 2017
