Updated On: 30 July, 2022 01:57 PM IST | Mumbai | Mayank Shekhar
The serial killer fellow, who is a “dil toote aashiqon ka messiah” (messiah of male broken hearts), avenging the sins of philandering women, who have cheated on their boyfriends. He finds them. He kills them. This sounds like the plot of ’90s B-grade

Ek Villain Returns Poster
For reasons altogether professional, I’ve been obsessed with traditional Bollywood villains lately. By which I mean a category of characters, who merged with the same set of actors, film after film—such that soon as, say, Prem Chopra or Ranjeet or Ajit showed up on screen back in the day, the audiences knew they’d be up to some bad. This saved on screen time. This continued for decades.
Up until the ’90s, I think, specifically, Abbas-Mustan’s `Baazigar` (1993) onwards, when the lead actors began to take on the anti-hero roles too. Also, as the films’ running time came down, and the hero-heroine’s parts remained the same, the stock villain’s parts (like the mother, sister, brother) began to recede. Which is not what happened in the mainstream South, for instance.