It is a dark room. The camera pans from bottom to top, a light pops on and the news anchor and her guest who is a medium, come into view. A lively discussion ensues about ghosts and the after-life. All is well till the medium shuts her eyes in order to commune with a ghost. A dim light reveals a pale figure, standing right behind the chatty anchor. She is the ghost. And, this is how the Tamil horror comedy Athiyayam, begins.
When Santhosh Kumar, a city-based film maker, initially imagined this scene, he wondered how he was going to shoot it. It had to look dark and scary. Luckily for him Gikku Jacob Peter, who was the assistant cinematographer of Drishyam, took only 20 minutes to visualise this scene. “It was shot with a candle and two bulbs, without using any artificial light. It was perfect. It was as if Gikku had read my mind,” says the 25-year-old Cognizant employee.
Athiyayam was premiered at Perks School, last week. Santhosh is thrilled with the feedback. “Four shows were organised and around 400 people turned up. Deepan Chakravarthy, the director of Pizza 2, inaugurated the screening. It was a great day for the entire crew.”
The movie revolves around a film-making crew, that comes to a cottage to shoot a horror film. Before they know it they themselves are in the thick of a horror story. “The best thing about a horror film is even without a stellar caste or mega budget, the film will work if it has a tight script. Pisasu and Pizza are examples of that,” points out Santhosh, who has worked with short film makers such as Ganesh Kumar Mohan.
A computer technology graduate and an MBA student, Santhosh released his first film called Clean Bowled, a romantic comedy, in 2013 on YouTube and over two lakh people watched it online. His second work was Nemesis, a movie about revenge. He then wanted to experiment with horror. But, he wanted to veer off the usual melodrama and revenge narrative. “I used to watch a lot of Korean films. They are masters of horror films. I wanted to make a film that had a gripping storyline and an unpredictable climax.”
A network of good friends was the back bone of the film, says Santhosh. “All my assistant directors including the producer of the film, Isaiamuthan, are my colleagues. Isaiamuthan was ready to invest in the film even without reading my script. Another friend of mine helped me find the cottage in Tiruppur.”
Gone are those days when you had to work for many years with a director to come up with an independent film of your own, says Santhosh. “With digital technology, anyone can make a decent short film these days. So when you approach a producer, your work speaks more than the experience. If he likes it, he is ready to invest in the script.”
Moreover, Internet has shrunk the world. “Many of the big film makers are active online. I got in touch with Deepan through Facebook. Also these are ideal platforms to launch our trailers and promos.”
Coimbatore is buzzing with young filmmakers who are exploring new themes. “For IT professionals like me a short-film genre is ideal for our hectic work schedules. Feature films demand we throw away our profession,” says Santhosh.
Still, it was not always easy to do the balancing act, he recalls.
“We had to shoot night sequences in the outskirts of the city. We would dread Mondays as our heads would still be buzzing with all the film talk.”
Despite all that, the entire crew enjoyed every second of making the film, says Santhosh. “We are happy that we are finally following our dream. And, hurdles are a part of film making. They say that the only way to know the difficulty of building a house and making a marriage work is by building a house and by tying the knot. Movie making is like that. You will know its problems only when you actually make one.”
(You can reach Santhosh Kumar at santhoshkumar030@gmail.com or xcusemeentertainers @gmail.com)