The show is titled Khauf, meaning dread – and dread it delivers in spades.
In the recently released Prime Video series, four women claim that their hostel in Delhi is haunted by a malevolent spirit. When Madhu (Monika Panwar) enters the hostel, it is unclear whether the women are projecting their anxieties onto her or something is actually lurking in the corridors and the back alley.
Herself a victim of violence, Madhu starts behaving in a manner that suggests demonic possession. A hoarse-voiced hakim (Rajat Kapoor) with a collection of poisonous potions gets involved, contributing an extra layer of creepiness.
Created by Smita Singh (Sacred Games, Raat Akeli Hai), Khauf uses the horror genre to explore the pervasive violence faced by women. The eight-episode series vividly harnesses lighting, lensing and production design (by Nitin Zihani Choudhary) to bring out Singh’s concerns. No space is free of fear or relief, with Delhi itself taking on the air of an open-air prison.
The Matchbox Shots production is co-directed by Pankaj Kumar, the brilliant cinematographer of Haider, Tumbbad and Guns & Gulaabs, and advertising filmmaker Surya Balakrishnan. The directors spoke to Scroll about finding the right visual schema to match Smita Singh’s vision of women trapped in and perverted by a toxic society. Here are edited excerpts from the interview.
What are the reactions you been getting to Khauf?
Pankaj Kumar: The show is quite intense. Also, it’s in the niche genre of horror. Considering all of that, I’m very happy with the response. I was expecting women to respond positively, but men have too.
Surya Balakrishnan: A lot of people have said that the show has made them angry. I don’t know if success is the right word – it’s sad that we need to make this show.
How did each of you get involved with the series?
Pankaj Kumar: Smita Singh approached me directly. I shot the film Raat Akeli Hai, which she wrote.
I knew the power of her writing. Once I started reading her script, I couldn’t stop. Even though I was in the middle of a shoot, I read all eight episodes in one go because they were so engaging.
Surya Balakrishnan: I came in much later, by which time Pankaj and Smita had done a lot of the work. Smita and I are both part of Tulsea, the talent management agency.
What interested me was how Delhi is and can be to women through horror as a genre. While the script used horror as a foundation, it said so much more.
Khauf has a distinctive design: long corridors, constricted spaces, lots of horizontal and vertical lines.
Surya Balakrishnan: There were many different spaces like the hostel, the forest, the cop station. The way Pankaj has shot and visualised the show, every camera movement has creepiness and eeriness no matter which space you are in.
Pankaj Kumar: The strength of the script is that the horror element is just the veneer. While the script has powerfully written characters, it also integrates the spaces very well into the narrative.
The irony of the hostel is that it is supposed to be a safe place for women, where they can be free from the fear of male violence. Then there is the everyday experience of taking public transport, being harassed in public spaces.
I explored the hostel in Delhi on which Smita had based her script. The hostel had a back alley that was quite terrifying for the women at that hostel. We shot in the actual back alley.
We constructed a set of the hakim’s haveli in a way that it feels claustrophobic. Anybody who enters that space feels completely trapped. It has iron bars that enclose the open corridors on all sides. It’s a maze-like structure.
Delhi has been filmed in an uncanny way. There is a strange emptiness, the feeling of being cut off from normalcy.
Pankaj Kumar: We used a subjective and limited point of view, in which the entire experience narrows down to one person. We did not open up the city from other perspectives. The camera does not show the space in a neutral way.
I wanted viewers to go into the minds of the characters and experience the city like they are experiencing it. We should be able to feel the fears, the tremors, rather than being told about them. By narrowing the perspective, we were able to create an immersive quality.
Surya Balakrishnan: The way the city has been treated makes it universal. It’s not just a story of Delhi or a hostel in Delhi. It feels like it can happen anywhere.
What conversations did you have about the lighting pattern? Numerous scenes are dunked in darkness. Then there is the terrifying hostel corridor.
Pankaj Kumar: There is external darkness and then internal darkness. The lighting is a manifestation of the psychology of the characters.
The strong lines, lighting effects and texture are important because I wanted real spaces. Many government-run hostels are rundown, because of which there is a kind of moisture on the walls. That becomes quite spooky – you start seeing figures in the textures of the walls. They start speaking back to you.
The lure of the corridor is that it provides perspective. It’s like an open space that is closing in.
You are subconsciously terrified of being sucked into the space. It acts like a vacuum. Just walking in the eerie silence of the corridor is spooky because it creates its own echoes.
What kind of lenses did you use?
Pankaj Kumar: I didn’t limit myself to a specific set of lenses. There are sequences where I have used either wide-angle or long lenses for close-ups.
For example, when Madhu is narrating her ordeal to Shohini [the therapist played by Shilpa Shukla], the camera is very close to Madhu’s face. It’s a telephoto lens.
In this scene, I want the camera to be observational. I don’t want the image to be unnecessarily disturbing because Madhu’s story itself is disturbing. All I can do is to observe her in silence and in extreme closeness.
When Madhu enters the hostel room for the first time and the first knock she hears, the camera creeps in close onto her face. That produces a disturbing effect. I don’t just want to observe her. I want to get into her world.
The one thing Khauf largely lacks is obvious jump scares.
Pankaj Kumar: There were initially more jump scares in the script. We also shot a few more jump scares than you see in the final show.
But as we went along, we realised that we didn’t need the jump scares. They would have served as distractions since we were already capturing the real horror – which is what the women face in everyday life.
We thought, let the genre be there on the surface, let’s stick to the core strength of the idea. We didn’t need to spook audiences any further. We kept chipping away and kept only a couple of jump scares.
I personally don’t like cliched horror tropes. What I loved about Tumbbad was that it didn’t have typical horror elements. in Khauf too, it’s not about jump scares or a ghost story. The horror is metaphorical.
Both Smita and I admire Roman Polanski. The poisoning is kind of a tribute to Rosemary’s Baby. Also Stanley Kubrick. Contemporary filmmakers like Ari Aster and Robert Eggers are doing great work in horror.
Surya Balakrishnan: There is a ghost, but then there is also a lot more horror outside of the ghost. That’s scarier than an entity. Whose power is it? Is it Madhu’s or the entity’s? That kind of slight confusion as to where it’s coming from makes it even scarier.
What was the casting process like?
Surya Balakrishnan: By the time I came on board, the casting was done.
Pankaj Kumar: All the actors except for Rajat Kapoor were selected through auditions. When we saw Monika’s audition, there was a unanimous yes. She performed a complex scene in which she transforms from one person into another.
Smita was keen on getting Shalini Vatsa to play the warden. The other women went through rigorous workshops to develop chemistry among themselves.
Both Smita and I wanted Rajat Kapoor for the hakim. There is a certain gravitas in Rajat’s voice, he has immense talent.
The hakim has a hoarse voice that is textured by the poison. Rajat brought a bass quality to his voice. Just watching him perform was creepy. I started exploring the images in ways that would enhance the hakim’s personality.
The first time we introduce the hakim, the camera is creeping up from behind him to a close-up. It was a great introduction for Rajat because of the intense way he was performing and interacting with the character sitting in front of him.
Khauf has been criticised for being over-layered to the point of repetition and exhaustion. There is little relief from the violence or the horrors. Could the series have been tighter or even shorter?
Pankaj Kumar: Initially, the show was longer. There were a few more back stories, and the motivations for actions were explored further. One draft had Hakim’s back story, which was quite intriguing.
Each episode was turning out to be longer than an hour. We curtailed the script and cut it down further in the editing. Perhaps we would have cut the show down even more, after some introspection.
Surya Balakrishnan: As an afterthought, having watched the show as an audience member rather than a part of the crew, there were parts when I felt, do I have to watch this again, I got it.
Also read:
‘Khauf’ review: A relentlessly dark tale of human and demonic possession
Everybody loves the camerawork in ‘Tumbbad’. Pankaj Kumar tells us how the film was shot
