In the last decade, independent directors, followed by more mainstream filmmakers, have coined a new language of Indian horror. Moving away from urban middle-class lives, spaces and values, they have tapped into folk traditions to frighten audiences.

Fifteen years after mysterious events unfolded in Tumbbad—a bleak, rain-soaked hamlet in the Sahyadri range of Maharashtra—Vinayak (Sohum Shah) returns to his ancestral land. As a child, he had fled with his mother to Pune, vowing never to go back to this terrifying place. Yet the village holds a haunting grip on him—and here he is, back again. Rahi Anil Barve’s 2018 folk horror film, eponymously named Tumbbad, was hailed by critics as signalling a shift in Indian horror aesthetics towards more culturally specific stories and framed as part of a global folk horror revival. The hero’s repeated trips from the colonial urbanscape of Pune to the remote hamlet mirror a broader shift: Indian horror has turned to the rural.

In India, the horror genre once focused on the internal—paranormal forces invading private, upperand middle-class spaces like holiday homes and high-rises, as seen in Raat (1992), Raaz (2002), and Bhoot (2003). In the last decade, however, the focus has shifted outward, to the external—to landscape, atmosphere, and communities living in communion with nature. At the same time, the essence of the horror changed too. From possession by the avenging undead, horror was externalised in figures of mythic demons, wilful demigods and monstrous maternal forces.