For most of us, Bollywood is all about mushy, fairytale romances ending on a happily ever after note. In recent times, however, the industry has been experimenting with a variety of genres, especially horror, which had long been treated with disdain. While an increasing number of filmmakers seem to be realisising the potential of a haunting, the market for scary movies largely remains untapped. On the occasion of Halloween, we track the scope of the spooky genre in India.

Scream and shriek
Last year, Anurag Kashyap-led Phantom Films tied up with international production houses, Blumhouse Production and Ivanhoe Pictures to exploit the horror genre. Now, Neeraj Pandey and Shital Bhatia have launched Friday Fearworks which will produce only freaky movies. They believe the film category has a lot of offer in terms of scripts and concepts. “The market has always been there, but hasn’t been utilised to its capacity. The return on investment (RoI) in this genre is much larger than conventional big starrer films. Even in overseas market, 'Conjuring' and 'Insidious 2' had bigger RoIs than 'Iron Man 3' and 'Prometheus'. In Bollywood, films like 'Raaz' and 'Ragini MMS' and its sequel have been extremely successful.