“Horror films are generally not as circumspect about maintaining the reality effect as Freud would like”, Jonathan Crane presents as a contradiction to the psychologist’s claim that the genre resists disbelief, and discovers its affect in the sincere terrors of castration, abjection, and deferred action. Freud believes that by transposing a supernatural being or a monster upon a seemingly lifelike space and time, a spectator is more likely to acquiesce to the imagined world. However, as Crane argues, Freud ignores the irony in horror’s fiction—the inherent apprehension in a spectator’s bated breath before the jump-scare, before it is made evident what is true and what is not. And so, what happens when the film’s diegesis mirrors the irrational quality of the uncanny entity? I believe the following scene answers that very question.
Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 (2022) is the second part of a franchise of horror-comedies—part of an increasingly profitable cycle of films that rose to popularity in the last decade of Hindi cinema. The film’s humour, as you can tell, relies on a slapstick corporeality (and unfortunately, an undertone of misogyny) to demystify the cloaked figure of the crone that appears so frequently in the canon of horror films. As the religious zealot approaches who he believes is his sister-in-law, he speaks to her about the inane details of her domestic chores, until he is interrupted by an extreme close-up of her decaying visage—which is immediately proceeded by a computer-generated sequence of the hag throwing the man around like a rag-doll. In this wide-angle, she is no longer an apparition we can barely see. She is no longer scary, and is instead a vaudeville contraption in the vein of Bergson’s “mechanical encrusted upon the living”.
As Caroll attests of the monster’s balancing-act in the horror-comedy, “Once their fearsomeness is factored out, what remains is their status as a category error, which, of course, makes them apt objects of incongruity humor.” This is further evidenced when a nearly deaf preacher approaches her, slapped so vehemently by the demonic force that the film’s mise-en-scène travels across the quiet village in which the film is set, until it reaches his wife—whose voice he can now hear clearly. A motif I noticed in this week’s readings was the reference to games and the act of play, which appears to be at the centre of subverting the horror genre’s expectations—recontextualizing the supernatural as a comic-device. The genre is, as Crane argues, “really nothing more than a cinematic funhouse.” Bhool Bhulaiyaa similarly embraces this logic—or lack thereof—to create an audio-visual playground, where fear and laughter oscillate with equal force.