• Seeing Things
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Seeing Things

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In 1980s India, the Ramsay Brothers and other filmmakers produced a wave of horror movies about soul-sucking witches, knife-wielding psychopaths, and dark-caped vampires. Seeing Things is about the sudden cuts, botched makeup effects, continuity errors, and celluloid...
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  • 13 February 2024
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In 1980s India, the Ramsay Brothers and other filmmakers produced a wave of horror movies about soul-sucking witches, knife-wielding psychopaths, and dark-caped vampires. Seeing Things is about the sudden cuts, botched makeup effects, continuity errors, and celluloid damage found in these movies. Kartik Nair reads such "failures" as clues to the conditions in which the films were made, censored, and seen, offering a view from below of the world's largest film culture. By combining close analysis with extensive archival research and original interviews, Seeing Things reveals the spectral materialities informing the genre's haunted houses, grotesque bodies, and graphic violence.
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Price: $85.00
Pages: 304
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Series: South Asia Across the Disciplines
Publication Date: 13 February 2024
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520392274
Format: Hardcover
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"Peeling off the monstrous mask of the horror genre, Seeing Things reveals a broad historical scope that encompasses independent film production, circulation, and regulation at a critical turning point in India’s film history."



"Nair’s Seeing Things marks a milestone in contemporary scholarly attention to the history of Indian cinemas."

“An embarrassment of riches, where index rubs against index, forming palimpsests ready to be activated and dissected. . . . Seeing Things reveals a broad historical scope that encompasses independent film production, circulation, and regulation at a critical turning point in India’s film history.”



"Nair weaves a unique tale of the materiality of Bombay horror. . . [The] book pulsates with thrilling descriptions of shooting, screening, censoring, losing, finding and restoring the Bombay horror genre, all the while highlighting and celebrating its distortions and failures."



"By encouraging us to rethink horror and Indian cinemas in ways that affect the study of other kinds of films as well, Seeing Things is poised to make significant conceptual, historical, and methodological contributions to the field."

Kartik Nair is Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Film and Media Arts at Temple University.
Contents

Acknowledgments 

Introduction: Accidental Exposures 

1. Paper Cuts: Inside the Bureaucratic Encounter with Darwaza 
2. Celluloid Splatter: The Graphic Violence of Jaani Dushman 
3. Unsettling Design: Built Atmosphere in Purana Mandir 
4. Making Monsters: Veerana and the Craft of Excess 
5. Hidden Circuits: Kabrastan from Film to Videotape 

Epilogue: An Archive of Failures 

Notes 
Bibliography 
Index