Few Good Horror Movies in Bollywood

This is in response to a Reddit question about why there are so few good horror movies in Bollywood. Many factors come together, here are a few:

There are many good suspense movies in Bollywood, why not horror then? What they could be pointing at, perhaps, is the utter lack of context in the horror movies that were made. It is not about wearing on masks and lenses. It is about what profoundly scares us, from our primeval fears to our modern paranoia. It is only in the state of darkness that we dwell on the questions of our existence. It has shaped our beliefs since all recorded history.

Instead of this as a guiding point, when the director has a poorly dressed murderous spirit, or a hand stretching, wild prosthetics screamer, it becomes laughable. Do not even get me started on the use of pentacle in the television horror series!

There are a couple of good horror movies now, obviously, but the question seems directed at the overall legacy. There are a few lesser known movies that must be mentioned. Mani Kaul's Doovidha (How handsome is Ravi Menon!) and Ram Gopaal Vurma's Raat come to mind. 

Moreover, Horror writing as a genre in English is only about three hundred years old. That is not counting the literature surrounding demons and evil spirits. Shakespeare could really go to some dark places of the mind but he still did not write horror. Hollywood saw the visual potential of this treasure trove immediately, and had the essential resources to make them. 

As such most of the old horror movies were all made from novels. And the movies that we used to think of good horror movies back then even in Hollywood, not all of them have aged well with time. The screaming women and the women venturing out at night abound!

The Japanese are the ones who understand the genre to the core, they have the most exhaustive ancient literature revolving around horror, and their horror archetypes are too many. Which is why the directors there, could tap into the genre, and they could even modernize it. They used it to explore the existential crisis their society was facing after the civil wars. Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba or Mizoguchi Kenji's Ugetsu Monogatari

In India, of course we have some literature around horror, from old mythology to new novels. But the understanding of the genre in films, we didn't have that. Moreover, there are  other factors like production cost, lack of value for a script. These must have been a few reasons. They used to say, one couldn't make an out and out horror movie in India because the censor board wouldn't pass it. The rule was, you could make whatever you want, as long as it ended in the way, that suggested that the whole thing was a misunderstanding. This rule existed because the government did want to participate in the promotion of superstition. 

Of course with changing times, horror movies are getting better. Pari and Tumbbad are two great examples. There are many in other languages. Hopefully the genre will evolve and we will have some, rooted, true to our times and society, horror movies.