Boo ha ha: Horror comedy is India’s new favourite obsession

Bollywood’s fav new genre is frightfully funny. Two actors tell us why horror and humour are not so different after all

Laugh the vampires back into the castle, tickle the monsters back underneath the bed. The best horror movies of our time are turning out to be comedies. Stree 2, the year’s biggest hit, is a story of a gang of friends fighting a headless monster who is intent on kidnapping women. Munjya, which also released this year, draws from Indian myth and has as many laughs as it has scares. Romancham, about a bewitched ouija board, was the fifth-highest-grossing Malayalam film of 2023. India now has a horror-comedy franchise (Bhool Bhulaiyaa 1, 2 and the upcoming 3) and hits in Marathi, Telugu and Bengali. And somewhere, the ghost of Goa Goa Gone, the Bollywood zombie comedy that started it all in 2013, is rolling in its grave, laughing.

Actors Pankaj Tripathi and Aparshakti Khurana say injecting humour into a scary situation calls for a different kind of talent.

Horror and humour seem like an odd pairing, but they have a lot in common, says Tripathi.

Actor Aparshakti Khurana has learnt that in both horror and comedy, timing is everything. (NITIN SIDANA)

Go Goa Gone (2013) is the defining horror comedy of the genre, the one that started it all.