ABSTRACT
The first chapter titled ‘The masculinist economy of possession narratives’ traces and defines the possession/occult sub-genre of horror narratives in Indian films. Studying the possession/occult as a compelling category distinct from other sub-genres such as the vampire films, it simultaneously explains how the notion of possession seen in Indian horror is different from what is understood in Western horror films. Drawing examples from the Hindi Gehrayee (dir. Vikas Desai and Aruna Raje, 1980) and Bhoot (dir. Ram Gopal Varma, 2003), Malayalam Chemistry (dir. Viji Thampi, 2009), Tamil Pillai Nila (dir. Manobala, 1985) and Kannada Yaaradu? (dir. Srinivasa Kaushik, 2009), this chapter discusses how the possession of the bodies of adolescent females, a young married woman, a girl child, an old mother and a teenage boy can be read as sites of socio-economic and -cultural exploitation. This chapter concludes that the dominant heterosexual masculinist economy of possession-horror narratives is deeply invested in socio-cultural violations of the autonomy of both the female and of ‘softer’ or less normative masculinities, even as these narratives generate spaces of negotiations.
