HORROR’S FIRST FAMILY

Suffering from a huge setback at the box-office, movie producer F.U. Ramsay took a hard decision to slash costs the next time around. That’s how he landed up in Kashmir in the off-season with his seven sons, and rented a houseboat to conduct classes in film-making for his brood. Over three gruelling months, he taught them everything he knew.

He’d left Mumbai with his family; he returned with a highly trained film crew that went on to make India’s first horror film, Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche (1972).

Indian films were never quite the same afterwards, journalist Shamya Dasgupta writes in Don’t Disturb

the Dead, a forthcoming book about the Ramsays, India’s first family of horror. While Hindi cinema had previously ventured into Gothic suspense with the likes of Kamaal Amrohi’s Mahal, Do Gaz... was something new: a psychological thriller and scream flick about a husband who returns from the dead to haunt his cheating wife and her lover.