HORROR GENRE NEEDS A REINVENTION

EAR gets a new face in Prime Video's recently released series Khauf. Its source is not just supernatural but is rooted in the horrifying reality of hypermasculinity.

- SHREYAS PANDE

EAR gets a new face in Prime Video's recently released series Khauf. Its source is not just supernatural but is rooted in the horrifying reality of hypermasculinity. This horror tale is set in Delhi and shows women being catcalled, felt up and, in worse cases, stained with bodily fluids. What ghosts can be scarier than just men on the street?

The series centers around a worn-out women's hostel where a traumatic event triggers a host of supernatural incidents. For its inhabitants, there is no escape from the evil eye—inside or outside. Creator and writer Smita Singh, who was part of the writer's room for the crime-drama Sacred Games (2018-2019), got the idea for making Khauf from her own experiences of living in a women's hostel in Delhi in the late 1990s. "Women from all over the country had come to stay there. I was very interested in knowing what brought them to Delhi, and I could see their struggles. Their stories had a lot of emotional weight which stayed with me," she says, adding that she wanted to explore these stories with a blend of horror. "I wanted to show how fear lives in urban spaces and how you can make it into a tangible kind of horror."