Taste, Taboo, Trash: The Story of the Ramsay Brothers

Abstract

Through the 1970s and 1980s, the Ramsay Brothers forged a career in the lower reaches of the Bombay film industry, creating a niche market for their cheaply produced horror films. Despite drawing committed audiences in B-and C-centers, these films were dismissed by the urban English press as clumsy counterfeit versions of American and British products, and by the late 1990s a new school of practitioners led by Ram Gopal Varma had begun producing slick and songless horror films that could translate internationally.Little is known of the Ramsays' production and distribution practices, their frugal discipline, their internal star system, and their markets in India's rural territories. Using first-hand interviews and trade journals, this paper excavates the history of a cottage industry of terror that rode the same wave as Bombay's blockbusters. It is perhaps perversely appropriate that the Ramsay Brothers rose to prominence in the 1970s, a time when the question of cinema-its politics, aesthetics, and status as "bad object"-returned to the fore in Bombay. Using essays and reviews from popular film magazines (especially Filmfare), as well as censorship documents from the CBFC archives, this paper navigates the discursive life of the Ramsay Brothers as a way to illuminate the fault-lines of taste over which cinema was popularly judged in the 1970s and 1980s.

The horrific laughter inPachadlela: A study of Marathi horror-comedy

“…This is true of the genre of horror-comedy in Indian cinema in general and Marathi 1 films in particular. The horror genre in Indian cinema is a relatively little-studied subject where, further, scholars have largely confined themselves to Hindi horror films (see Gopal 2012;Nair 2012;Sen 2011;Vitali 2011). Film scholarship on Indian regional cinema is still very nascent, and Marathi horror-comedies stand virtually unrepresented.…”

The Bad-Shahs of Small Budget: The Small-budget Hindi Film of the B Circuit

“…These were after all the days when the Ramsay brothers traveling the B and C circuits for over a decade had turned horror into a bankable genre and carved a market for their cheaply produced horror films. Discovering primary markets in the B and C and D centers, the brothers had found a way to sidestep exhibition monopolies in A circuits releasing only a dozen or so prints for the less reputable theaters in the cities, catering mainly to an audience in the interiors (Nair, 2010). But, business they did, recovering more than double the money invested in production, consistently raking in returns while mainstream films lost money and audiences.…”

Book Review: Meraj Ahmed Mubarki, Filming Horror: Hindi Cinema, Ghosts and Ideologies and Meheli Sen, Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre, and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema

“…Generously illustrated with well-chosen film stills and posters, Filming Horror and Haunting Bollywood are the first book-length studies of Hindi horror and supernatural cinema, and build on published articles and anthology chapters, including those by Pete Tombs (2003), Shubham Roy Chaudhury (2007), Kartik Nair (2008, 2012, 2013), Mithuraaj Dhusiya (2012, 2014), and Shubhajit Chatterjee (2013). 1 This subfield of Indian film studies has grown in tandem with a renaissance of the Hindi horror film.…”