ABSTRACT
The chapter titled ‘The ghastly gendered narrative of animal transformation’ investigates the rich corpus of human-to-animal transformation in Indian horror films. Collating principle characteristics of most of these transformation horror films, this study delineates this sub-genre into two broad categories: man-to-animal and woman-to-animal transformation horrors. Through the exploration of the Hindi Nagin (dir. Rajkumar Kohli, 1976), Jaani Dushman (dir. Rajkumar Kohli, 1979), Nagina (dir. Harmesh Malhotra, 1986), Junoon (dir. Mahesh Bhatt, 1992) and Hisss (dir. Jennifer Lynch, 2010) and the Telugu Punnami Naagu (dir. Rajasekhar, 1980), this chapter studies metaphorical expression of socio-political anxieties witnessed during the 1975 National Emergency, the gradual emergence of the Hindutva nationalism in the 1980s, class and caste politics of the 1970s and 1980s Andhra Pradesh, and the Third World economic and ecological exploitation. The chapter concludes that while woman-to-animal horror narratives can be read as gender negotiation discourses, man-to-animal generally focalises around crises of masculinities. The gendered complexities depicted in these horror narratives can be articulated through socio-political chronicles of their times.
