In 1980s India, the Ramsay Brothers and other filmmakers produced a wave
of horror movies about soul-sucking witches, knife-wielding psychopaths,
and dark-caped vampires. Seeing Things is about the sudden cuts,
botched prosthetic effects, continuity errors, and celluloid damage in
these movies. Such moments may very well be "failures" of various kinds,
but in this book Kartik Nair reads them as clues to the conditions in
which the films were once made, censored, and seen, offering a view from
below of the world's largest film culture. Combining extensive archival
research and original interviews with close readings of landmark films
including Purana Mandir, Veerana, and Jaani Dushman, this book
tracks the material coordinates of horror cinema's spectral images. In
the process, Seeing Things discovers a spectral materiality--one that
informs Bombay horror's haunted houses, grotesque bodies, and graphic
violence and gives visceral force to our experience of the genre's
globally familiar conventions.