Haunted

Some ghost stories leave you scared, some make you laugh. This one makes you yawn

Haunted is exploitation cinema at its worst. Though a ghost story, it has little interest in exploring the paranormal or in scaring the living daylights out of you. It is a film that obsesses with a ghost molesting a woman, and shows the abuse in loving detail.

The film is about a piano teacher who is so turned on by his student, Meera, he jumps her while she is playing an intricate new piece. She knocks him dead with a candlestick, but he is so consumed by lust, he turns into an evil spirit and jumps her again. In desperation, she kills herself.

This happens in 1936 in a beautiful house called Glen Manor, and the spirit, evidently priapic, continues to rape his student (now a ghost like him) all along till 2011.

The rapes go on unabated and are extraordinarily explicit. You see the victim, Meera (Tia Bajpai), writhing on the table, often violated at both ends, trying to escape an invisible rapist. At one point, the piano teacher appears in drag and sticks out a giant retractable tongue to kiss her. This is kinky stuff!

One day a confident young man called Rehan (Mahakshay Chakraborty) turns up at Glen Manor. He is unfazed by the haunting of the ‘Shaitan’ and cuts through the ectoplasm to hear Meera plaintively crying for help.

At first, he takes the help of a psychic. But the nervous clairvoyant is intimidated by the evil spirit. Then, a chillum-smoking tramp helps out, advising Rehan to fuse into Meera’s spirit. This done, it is back to the future, and he ends up in 1936. We are now in a position to alter the order of events on that fateful day.

Haunted is extraordinarily long and boring, and though the gimmicks are occasionally clever, their endless repetition wears you down. How many times can you watch a paranormal thingamajig drag people across a carpet?

ghosthorrorVikram Bhatt