March is proving to be the month of macabre tales. After Pari , comes Palace of Horrors. If words could express emotions, hallucinating and creepy come close to describing Ashim Ahluwalia’s latest piece. The National Award-winning filmmaker’s sharp and short segment is part of the International horror anthology, The Field Guide To Evil, and will have its world première at the prestigious South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin next week.
Starring Niharika Singh, who was once Ashim’s Miss Lovely , it features Mark O’Gleby, Henry Throop and Robin Das. Set within the Sunderban jungles in a crumbling palace, home to strange malformed, barely-human curiosities, collected by a long-dead king, it unfolds over the summer of 1913 in Bengal. The message is simple – money can’t buy you everything, but the way Ashim makes the English circus agent discover how Indian ‘gods are real’, it pricks the conscience.
At the time of the release of Miss Lovely, Ashim told this journalist about his love for kitschy horror films of the ‘70s and ‘80s, which were essentially derivatives of Hollywood’s slasher flicks. “I love trashy horror films, and a lot of that really featured in Miss Lovely . But I wanted to do something totally different with this one. I wanted to try and create another vision of Indian horror, something haunting and dream-like,” says Ashim.
Excerpts:
What was the catalyst?
A bunch of producers including those involved with films like Blair Witch , Anomalisa and The Lobster had this idea of getting eight international filmmakers to do something different with horror. They wanted to produce an anthology feature film focusing on folk horror from different cultures called A Field Guide To Evil . Each director was from a different country and was asked to make a short that would eventually become part of the larger feature. I had never made a horror film before, but they had really liked Miss Lovely and asked if I would be interested. I had complete freedom to do whatever I wanted, so it was hard to resist.
How did you come across this folk tale?
I was keen to make something Gothic, in black & white, like a forgotten HP Lovecraft story set in the jungles of Bengal. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe were huge influences on the tone. And yet I wanted to have very strong Indian elements. I spoke to folklorists and others that had been collecting local occult tales. Then I started looking online. There is a story about this ghost town of Kuldhara in Rajasthan, and another, where this lunatic king cut his body parts off one by one, causing his family and courtiers to abandon him in an empty palace. I started putting these together, and decided to make it from the point of view of these two British colonial characters that come looking for things to exploit in India, and things just go horribly wrong.
Ashim Ahluwalia
Apart from what all human greed can do, there is something more to be read between the lines...
In Palace of Horrors , I didn’t want to get stuck with the tropes of traditional horror, but do some kind of mash-up with other genres. The idea of taking two colonial characters comes from orientalist Raj period films. Like they could be plucked out of Gunga Din (1939) or The Jewel in the Crown (1984).
All those films were made at a time when Britain was missing its old Indian colony, there was something nostalgic about going back, riding elephants, being carried by natives, going into the jungle; The main character is a circus agent, HB Gentry, whose job is to locate the most freakish thing he can find and take it back to Europe to monetise it. “We have money, we will pay” — that is the modus operandi. But, of course, you can’t just excavate anything and take it back. In this case, the consequences are truly horrific.
How did it take shape? Like your other work, it also comes across as a mood piece.
For Palace of Horrors, I was mostly influenced by black & white cinematography; I wanted to work with greyscale, with a very 19th Century atmosphere, almost like it was shot in gaslight. Silent B&W expressionist films like Haxan (1922) and Nosferatu were a big influence. Films without atmosphere tend to be dead films, and I like films that feel alive with mood and that immerse you completely.
Did the limited time duration prove a challenge?
I had just come off shooting Daddy , a long, complex film to make that spanned 40 years, so this was really a relief because it was short and very precise. We had to finish shooting it in four days. I think we all had a lot of fun making it like that.
Niharika Singh brings a mysterious Indian charm to the story...
I was keen to have her play an enigmatic Sadhvi, the lone caretaker of this abandoned palace. It was something she had never done and yet she totally embodies the character because she’s a great actress. I saw her as a kind of 19th century mystic – maybe like Sarada Devi. But with a more disturbing, eerie quality – like is she holy or completely possessed? I also imagined this Sadhvi to be somewhat reminiscent of the ghostly woman-in-white found in Japanese horror films, like Kwaidan . They use Kabuki-mask like make-up to denote a sort of “dead” quality of the character. So we combined these elements on Niharika, with the dead skin, the blackened teeth, the cat-eye lenses, the unendingly long hair.
We don’t realise how deeply our own forms are sometimes linked to other parts of the world. How primeval this all is. There is something ancient about these tales. There is some truthfulness to them, that’s what makes them so potent.
Will it lead to a full-length horror feature?
I don’t think so. But you never know.
