Why do we love ghost stories?

Our fascination with ghosts and monsters extends beyond the thrill of being frightened from a position of relative safety — they give shape to the things we fear but struggle to articulate without putting us in the direct line of danger. In recent years, filmmakers across South Asia have turned to horror to confront social realities of the region that are often more terrifying than the supernatural: that of gendered traumas, caste oppression, ecological collapse, and the enduring violence of power. In a region grappling with overlapping political, social, and environmental crises, the monster is rarely just a monster. It is the embodiment of a social order that reaches into our lives with its many invisible tendrils and tentacles, polices women’s bodies, renders minority lives disposable, and perpetuates human exploitation.

What makes horror such a compelling framework for these stories is its ability to unsettle the familiar. As freedom of speech and expression become contested, folklore, superstition, and the supernatural become ways of questioning buried histories and collective anxieties, particularly those that dominant historical and institutional narratives marginalise or erase. The churail, the witch, the vengeful spirit, and the inexplicable force lurking in the forest all become figures through which writers, artists, actors, and filmmakers interrogate who the society labels monstrous, whose suffering goes unseen, and whose fear is taken seriously. In these films, the uncanny does not exist in opposition to the real; it emerges from the violence embedded within it. These films look beyond the jump scare to examine the structures shaping our nightmares.

Here are four homegrown horror films you should watch this Halloween:

Rahul Sadasivan’s ‘Bramayugam’ (2024) is a Malayalam folk horror film that draws on the folk legends and cultural memory of 17th-century Kerala to explore the insidious relationship between power, caste, and oppression. The film follows Thevan, a folk singer who escapes a yakshi or succubus only to find himself trapped in a decaying ancestral mansion inhabited by the enigmatic Kodumon Potti — played by Mammootty — and his cook. Shot entirely in black and white, Bramayugam uses its stark cinematography, claustrophobic setpieces, and unsettling sound design to evoke a world in which escape seems almost impossible. Beneath its atmospheric horror lies a pointed critique of feudal hierarchies, the horrors of colonialism, and the structures that allow power to perpetuate itself across generations. Watch ‘Bramayugam’ on SonyLIV.

Drawing on eastern Himalayan folklore and the ‘Wild Woman’ archetype, Bhargav Saikia’s ‘Bokshi’ questions why women whose power, knowledge, or autonomy fall outside patriarchal structures have historically been made monstrous. In Bokshi, Sikkim’s old-growth forests in the eastern Himalayan foothills become a space where suppressed histories persist and where feminine power exists beyond the patriarchal social order that seeks to discipline it. Bokshi is an attempt to reclaim monstrosity as a language of resistance, connecting the policing of women’s bodies and behaviour to the wider systems of masculine domination through which both women and the natural world are controlled. Saikia describes the film as fundamentally feminist, explicitly interested in the origins of patriarchy and the historical persecution of women under the label of “witch”. Read more about the film here.

Set in 1800s colonial-era Bengal, Anvita Dutt’s ‘Bulbbul’ spans two decades of Bulbbul’s life: a child bride, a young adult wife, and a married woman in colonial-era Bengal. Historically, the churail, the backwards-footed supernatural entity from South Asian folklore, functioned as a warning against feminine transgression. In Bulbbul, Dutt asks what might have transformed a woman into such a monster. Watch Bulbbul on Netflix.

Mejbaur Rahman Sumon’s ‘Hawa’ (2022) takes place almost entirely on a fishing boat in the Bay of Bengal, occupied by men. As the fishermen, led by Chaan Majhi, venture out to sea, their nets unexpectedly haul in a mysterious young woman. Her arrival unsettles the all-male crew, who treat her as both a bad omen and an object of desire. When the boat’s mast breaks and a series of inexplicable events occur on the boat, the men’s suspicion turns toward the only woman aboard. The woman they caught from the sea becomes, in their eyes, the source of everything going wrong. The fishermen repeatedly invoke the ancient sailors’ superstition that women do not belong on boats, framing her presence as inherently contaminating or dangerous. Yet Sumon gradually turns that superstitious gaze back upon the men: they sexualise, covet, and fight over her, while she remains silent for much of the film, leaving the men to fill her silence with their own fantasies. Her inscrutability also pushes the boat’s crew to project their fears onto her as their calculations fail, their catch disappears, and the boat becomes subject to forces of nature beyond their control or comprehension. Watch ‘Hawa’ on SonyLIV.

If you enjoyed reading this, here’s more from Homegrown:

The Resurgence Of South Asian Folk Horror Shows Us That The Monsters Are All Around Us

‘Khauf’: How Director Surya Balakrishnan Used Horror As A Window Into Gendered Trauma

‘Bokshi’ Blends Folklore & Feminine Liberation To Rewrite The Rules Of Homegrown Horror