Khauf and Sinners: When the Past Isn’t Past Enough

Notes from the Undead: Horror That Heals, Hurts, and Howls

Two genre works — Khauf , a haunting Indian slow-burn series, and Sinners , an African-American vampire musical film — dismantle the idea of horror as escapism. They remind us that what we fear most is what we’ve failed to remember.

IN AN ERA WHEN HORROR is often used as a spectacle or seasonal thrill, Khauf and Sinners emerge as rare outings that reclaim the genre to reveal — and reckon with — cultural memory. Both works use genre as an act of remembering, excavating buried truths and identities through the vocabulary of fear, blood, and music. In Khauf , horror manifests in silence and surveillance, rendering a haunted present from the scars of political violence. In Sinners , vampirism becomes a cheeky but chilling metaphor for cultural erasure, as music and memory become the final battleground. These aren’t just films that frighten — they mourn, they remember, they resist. By decentering conventional narratives and using genre to reframe the ghosts of history, both pieces restore horror to its most radical function: storytelling that bleeds.

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Sinners: Ryan Coogler Summons The Cinema Gods

Rahul Desai

SINNERS stars Michael B Jordan as identical Black twins Smoke and Stack, who return to their hometown in 1930s Mississippi. It’s been 7 years, and their loaded backstory — a troubled childhood with a violent father; a World War I stint and plenty of PTSD; a brief return only to have their lives upended by tragedy; an escape to big city Chicago and an entry into the Al Capone gangster universe — bleeds into this film. None of it is shown, but every moment bristles with the unresolved baggage of history. Smoke’s reunion with his estranged wife, and occult ritualist Annie. Stack’s reunion with his white ex-girlfriend Mary. The brothers using their Chicago “blood money” to buy an abandoned sawmill from a former Klansman; their ‘recruitment’ of old friends to turn the sawmill into a rocking juke joint. A fleeting argument where Stack accuses Smoke of letting Annie “again” come between the brothers.

This backstory has enough meat to be a living, breathing film of its own. An unseen prequel of sorts. But the past is reduced to a series of passing mentions and expository hints. This ties into the profound core of Sinners : the invisible tangibility of a culture — and its edited influence on the archives of American living. Writer-director Ryan Coogler somehow compresses centuries' worth of the Black experience into a beautifully pulpy and poignant 137-minute motion picture about one wild night at a barrelhouse, bloodthirsty vampires, and most of all, music.

The lore of Sinners goes thus: great music has the power to rupture the space between life and death, but it also attracts the danger of those who want to usurp it. That gifted character in the film is the twins’ young cousin, Sammie (Miles Caton), an aspiring musician hired to perform on the opening night of the joint. His talent is so transcendental that — in perhaps the most spellbinding instance of cinema as an act of feeling and resistance — it stirs the spirits of the past and the future. This scene sounds so unfilmable that to see it is to believe in the immortal sanctity of art.

But Sammie’s genius is also so pure and mythical that it attracts the attention of three very white vampires: a Twilight -coded Irish-American immigrant and two crony Klansmen. Once all hell breaks loose, the twins and their motley gang set out to protect — to preserve — Sammie. The stakes are staged so ingeniously by Coogler’s genre poem that it projects a fight to preserve a people, not a person. Sammie’s fate comes to represent something far less generic than the continuity of humankind in a zombie survival thriller. If he dies (or worse, puts down that guitar), the voice of an entire culture dies. The future of the blues — soulful race music signifying the resilience and depth of African-American identity — faces extinction; the past, too, will be erased.

It takes some doing to go beyond the conventions of a racial drama and expose the language of white microaggression through the rhapsody of one night, but Coogler does it like nobody else. He remains the most inventive, direct and quietly necessary storyteller of a generation whose moviegoers are too often confronted with revisions of history and fetishisations of truth. In his case, what you don’t see is what you get. Vampirism and the infecting of patrons become cheeky allegories for not only the suppression of Black identity but also long-term colonisation through pop-cultural and artistic imposition. One of the many symbolic moments features the Irish vampire belting out a traditional bonfire anthem while newly ‘bitten’ Black guests sway to his performance. The way they move exudes a kind of subconscious compliance that reflects a modern landscape, one where generations of native-American and coloured artists have had to conform to — and create within the confines of — mainstream systems. He targets Sammie because he wants to homologize his talent and make it accessible. It’s the story of America in a nutshell: white immigrants reach the top of the food chain and feign belonging by ‘adapting’ the ways and preying on the trauma of marginalised locals.

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Khauf Is A Chilling Show On The Horrors Of Patriarchy

Ishita Sengupta

IN DELHI, an all-girls hostel is haunted. Strange noises are heard, and stranger things happen. Those living on the third floor, the focal point of the terror, are unable to step out. All except the one girl who has just arrived from Gwalior. Carrying pockets of horror in her body from the past, she seems immune to further dread. But stepping out in the urban jungle causes abrasion and flares up her past wounds. No one, it appears, is safe. But then, who is in Delhi?

In the last couple of years, the amorality of the city has been a fertile ground for shows in India. If Delhi Crime explored the social depravity of the space, then Made in Heaven looked at its failed moral compass; Paatal Lok probed into the foiled morality of the land and Trial by Fire inspected its scarring soul. The perversion of the city is so deep that the prospect of a lingering ghost at a ladies' hostel is not just reassuring but also promises to be cathartic. After all, when the presence of men on the street is deathly unsafe, then an otherworldly spirit can only offer protection.

This is an urgent but familiar premise. More recently, Amar Kaushik’s Stree (2018), whose success spawned several similar horror comedies, centred on a lighter version of this; Khauf, created and written by Smita Singh, not just defies but subverts the setting, proving in essence that, in the case of women, even sustaining hope for belated justice is deceptive. The eight-episode series deep-dives into the precarity of female existence and conveys the omnipresence of patriarchy through horror as an embellishment and upshot. The result is a strikingly uncompromising work that uses the format of long-form storytelling not as an excuse to reiterate tropes but to tell a specific story with universal resonance.

Madhuri (a pitch-perfect Monika Panwar) has newly relocated to Delhi. The move was fuelled by professional aspiration but also personal grieving. Something terrible had happened to her at Gwalior. Delhi, she hopes, will provide some respite. The presence of her partner, the soft-spoken Arun (the assured Abhishek Chauhan), offers comfort. A common friend’s boyfriend, Nakul (Gagan Arora), helps her out with accommodation at a remotely situated hostel, but instead of easing her worries, things get exacerbated. The previous tenant in the room died six months back, and the women on that floor, four of them, are convinced the room is haunted. Try as they might, they cannot seem to step out.

But even for Madhuri, who can step out, there is no respite. On buses, men press themselves against her, and she has a sinking feeling that the perpetrator of the abuse she had faced in Gwalior lives in the city itself. The scarring incident has also had a lasting impact on her relationship. With Arun being present when she was dragged away by three masked men, he continues feeling guilty, and Madhuri struggles to move on.

Directed by Surya Balakrishnan and Pankaj Kumar (the acclaimed cinematographer of films like Haider , Tumbbad ), Khauf is one of those rare shows on horror that remains attuned to the vicious forms of it in the corporeal world before the supernatural elements make an appearance. In effect, the ghost does not disrupt but amplifies the dread that already exists for women.

And there are many women. There is Madhuri, a woman dealing with past trauma, at the centre. There are her hostel mates: Svetlana (Chum Darang), a girl from Nagaland who nurses a well-earned apathy towards the city; Nikki (Rashmi Zurail Mann), an affluent girl who found a community at the hostel after being a misfit elsewhere because of her stuttering; Rima (Priyanka Setia), a pregnant woman who resists staying with her husband in fear of forced adoption in case she births a daughter, again; Komal (Riya Shukla) who lived a private life, unknown to all; Anu (Asheema Vardaan) the girl who hoped to build a life before she passed. Looking after them is Gracie Dungdung (a fantastic Shalini Vatsa), the warden, and there is her friend, Illu Mishra (a terrific Geetanjali Kulkarni), a police constable who left her abusive alcoholic husband only to forge a difficult relationship with her son (a scene-stealing Satyam Sharma) who has been missing for months.

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