The rise of the Indian undead

“That’s when we decided to write in a scene where the protagonist is explaining to a policeman what zombies are and how they can be killed,” says Sarpotdar. This scene was then used in the film’s first trailer. After nearly a month in theatres in January-February, Zombivli is now streaming on Zee5.

So what is a zombie? The undead first rose on the big screen in 1932, in Victor Halperin’s White Zombie. The idea of a contagious, voracious horde of undead can be traced to Haitian folklore. The Halperin film drew largely from William Seabrook’s 1929 novel, The Magic Island, a fictionalised account of the author’s visit to Port-au-Prince in the last days of the US occupation of Haiti. But it was George Romero’s 1968 B-movie, Night of the Living Dead, that really got the undead shuffling about at box offices around the world.

In Indian cinema, the concept never really caught on. We had our own version of the undead: the reincarnated hero, back for revenge, closure, or to finally get the girl.

Now, as audiences become more diversified and South Korean, Japanese and American films create an appetite for zombie fare, zombie-themed Indian feature films, short films and shows are beginning to pile up. A cop tries to help a group of doctors rein in a zombie outbreak in Miruthan (Tamil, 2016); a woman struggles to survive in a post-apocalyptic zombie-ridden West Bengal, in Zombiesthaan (Bengali; 2019); villagers battle an army of bloodthirsty British zombie soldiers in Netflix’s Betaal (Hindi; 2020); a failed vaccine experiment turns healthy people into zombies in G-Zombie (Telugu, 2021); a gamer and his friends get caught in inter-village rivalry amid a sudden zombie attack, in Zombie Reddy (Telugu; 2021).

In that last one, the virus that turns people into the undead is called coronavirus. “It made sense because the audience could relate their experiences of the lockdown and the fear of the virus,” says filmmaker Prashanth Varma. He had been toying with the idea of making a zombie film for almost seven years, he adds, and the outbreak of the pandemic in late 2019 gave him the final push.

Like Sarpotdar, Varma relied on his film’s promotional material to introduce to his audience the concept of the undead. “Even though our film didn’t have a very big cast, it opened really well in theatres. People who aren’t a fan of the genre came to watch because it promised to be a fun film,” Varma says.

Around the world, most zombie stories use the same mythology: a plague infects an area and turns people into ravenous undead cannibals. The myth lends itself marvellously to layers and metaphor, and zombie films run the gamut from gorefest to romcom and wry social commentary. In Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004), a British slacker wins back his ex-girlfriend while running from the undead. The acclaimed Train to Busan (Korean; 2016) combines zombie mayhem with the tale of a man and his estranged daughter, to offer a searing critique of capitalism and South Korean society.

In Indian cinema, the element of levity has so far been vital because the idea of the zombie is still unfamiliar to large parts of the audience, and comedy, as Sarpotdar puts it, is always an easier sell. Varma has a script for a “serious” zombie film that he wrote before Zombie Reddy. But he couldn’t find takers for it, he says.

Zombiesthaan is an exception in this respect. The idea for it came to director Abhirup Ghosh after a particularly heated political discussion with a friend. “At some point in the conversation, I realised that we were just going around in circles and that all of us become mindless followers of people, customs and things, much like brainless zombies,” Ghosh says. His zombie movie takes on misogyny, classism and religious extremism.

Regardless of which path a zombie filmmaker chooses, some struggles are shared, a key one being how to get the look of the walking corpses right. Any good zombie film requires an ace prosthetics and make-up team. Small budgets and limited experience has meant that most makeup artists working on Indian projects have been learning as they go.

“After a lot of online research, we used latex to get the pale, bruised-skin look. There was a lot of DIY involved, like using glue-hardened tissue to make peeling skin,” says Samriddha Nag, make-up artist on Zombiesthaan.

“Our film was shot in sequence so you can see a marked improvement from the zombies in the early parts to the climax,” adds Varma, laughing. “We got better partly by watching YouTube make-up tutorials.”