Experience ‘nightmare’ one more time...

Ramsay House of Horror is coming to town with the screening of Veerana this Saturday

Bengaluru: When you hear the story of how the legendary Ramsay Brothers came to be, it almost sounds like a superhero team being assembled. “It started with my grandfather F.U. Ramsay, who came to India from Karachi and started with a radio business but was always inclined to pursue filmmaking.

He realised how making films takes too much time because the heads of so many departments need to be coordinated. He had seven sons and he decided to train them all by taking all of them to Kashmir for two months and learned that each son had a different ability – one was good at direction, one had an eye for the camera and another had a good ear for sound design,” said Deepak Ramsay, who joined the family business at age 15 as an assistant director on Veerana.

Armed with this knowledge, they made Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche with the seven sons working together in one location in record time and became a big hit. Since the 1970s, the Ramsays have gone on to make about 45 films, and TV shows, including Zee Horror Show and Naagin and it has recently been announced that Ajay Devgn will be making a biopic about their journey.

Deepak who worked extensively on Zee Horror Show, in which he directed over 200 episodes in seven years, is responsible for the nightmares many people had growing up and a theme song that is unforgettable.

The low-budget films they made innovated a lot with makeup and prosthetics. “Back then prosthetics were in a very nascent stage and very experimental. We only used masks, some imported from London but they completely killed the actor’s performance since the whole face was covered.

Then Srinivas Patro who created the visual effects for Veerana created patches of makeup and latex that changed the game. It would still take 8-9 hours to do the make-up and if you had a shoot in the evening, they would have to start at 9 am,” explains Deepak.

Deepak believes horror has far more acceptance now than it did back in the day, he said “Back then, we had limitations because horror films always got ‘A’ certificate that took away half your audience and we couldn’t get A-list actors because they thought we made films on a very flimsy budget. But now it is accepted as a genre that is watched by people of all ages.”

Some of their classics like Purana Mandhir, Purani Haveli, and Veerana are being digitally remastered for a boxset. The remastered print of Veerana will be screened for the first time at Suchitra to bring in Halloween.

“Some of these films are cult classics which people have grown up with, they will never forget Samri from Purana Mandir or Jasmine from Veerana, people still want to know what happened to the actors,” said Deepak who will be at the screening alongside film historian Dhruv Somani, the author of A Touch of Evil.

The screening and boxset are thanks to the efforts of Sandesh Shenoy of Bollywood Crypt. “He got in touch with us in 2018 to purchase merchandising rights for some of our films and the relationship grew from here. He has helped us get distribution rights overseas and hopefully we will soon do a full-fledged Ramsay film festival,” said a hopeful Deepak.