Janhvi Kapoor Starrer Ghost Stories’ Promotion Involves Propogating Superstitions And It’s A Terrible Idea
I was about 12 years old when I experienced what I still call my first and thankfully only paranormal experience. I was sleeping in my bed, when suddenly I started feeling colder than usual and it broke my sleep. Normally I’d just shift sides, wrap the blanket around me tighter and doze right off again, but not that night. That night I felt like there was someone watching me from behind and having the faint heart that I do, I did the only thing I knew best. Closed my eyes tight and hoped it was only a dream. A few moments later, still not gathering enough courage to look back, I suddenly felt a draft of cold first come closer and then pass right through me, and then weirdly, beyond. That night I screamed so loud my father busted my door open with a bat in hand, thinking we’d had a break in. Later, we found out it was only the air conditioning; it had been set on a swing mode automatically. The point of this over-descriptive narration is that it is easy to get fooled by what we’ve seen or heard and tend to let our mind imagine the worst, and overlook the obvious. And sometimes (actually most of the times) it just your overactive imagination.
But we are a country that thrives on its superstitions, from cutting your nails to sweeping the floor, a lot of things are dictated by luck or years of bad luck. I have butter fingers and have broken many glasses in my house – we should’ve been in a permanent state of bad luck but we are not. And for the most part, I don’t believe in these superstitions.
But I also know that a large part of the country does. And so, you want to be careful if you’re going to be propagating that. Something that we suspect might happen with the promotion strategy of Ghost Stories on Netflix.
A Netflix original, Ghost Stories is the cumulative directorial effort of 4 directors – Karan Johar, Dibakar Bannerjee, Zoya Akhtar and Anurag Kashyap, all four of whom would be presenting their short films in this one feature film. Set on a similar format as Lust Stories, this movie has gathered quite the buzz. And even though I wouldn’t be able to sit through 5 minutes of this movie (I am a bonafide fattu), I was excited for its release. That was up until I realised how the promotions of the movie was perhaps doing more damage than the horror element in it could ever do.
Also Read : Ghost Stories’ Trailer Won’t Even Scare The Fattu In Your Group. Maybe The Whole Movie Will Be Better?
This wouldn’t be the first movie of the genre to be going up, but we’re afraid that with the way the movie is being promoted, say with the members of the cast sharing their own paranormal experiences and incidents they’d heard of, it might just be shifting course from fiction to superstition. In a recent post on Instagram, Janhvi Kapoor, who’ll be seen in Zoya Akhtar’s segment, the actress shared how, “Apart from being a classic ghost story, the script resonated with me on a very deep level. The horror is more emotional and human than anything external. Something that spooked me out was that after we wrapped the shoot, about 10 of us fell really, really sick,”
Hey Janhvi, what if it was a case of really bad food poisoning or something?
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Where as, in another post, Vijay Varma shared, “The set was great, but we didn’t really get the time to notice scary occurrences… maybe that was scary? But when I was in 10th, my friend’s sister got ‘possessed’. Later I watched Bhool Bhulaiya, and realised that it could be psychological.” Mrunal Thakur, on the other hand who shot for Karan Johar’s segment shared, “While shooting the wedding night scene, the cameraman looked through the camera and said, ‘I told you guys, I don’t want that white light from the window’ but there was no one standing near the window,”And honestly, it forced us to wonder if creating superstition is what the filmmakers have in mind as the promotional strategy for this film.
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The thing is, we understand that promotions are important to keep the chatter around the film going and relevant till it hits the screens. It is important to hype it up, but with these kind of promotions that revolve around the paranormal, more than excitement, you’re giving people a reason to believe in superstition.
Take the movie Zoya Factor for instance. The rigorous promotions circled majorly around asking and telling people about the superstitions they believe in and while it may all be for laughs, it does offer added inclination towards believing in this stuff. In a country like India, that already is knee deep in stereotypes and superstitions, this can never be received well.
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Similarly, the promotions for Ghost Stories reek of superstitions and myths, that are likely to give the staunch believers another reason to stand by and validate their other decades old thinking, most of which is baseless, prejudiced and extremely stereotypical. We hope it isn’t what the makers of the film are going for, because the last thing the people of this country need right now is a promotion strategy that feeds off their fear.
The film is set to start streaming on Netflix on 1st January 2020 and is being produced by RSVP Movies and Flying Unicorn Entertainment.
