Home is where the horror is in Syed Shadan’s short Chaar Diwari. Set in Mumbai, the film begins with a broker showing the “perfect house” to the unnamed protagonist, played by Abhinav Jha. The flat is spacious and the previous tenants have left a usable item or two. But soon the protagonist starts suspecting that the house might be getting smaller by the day. As loneliness and the feeling of being stuck starts muddling with his mind, he starts to feel that the walls are closing in, quite literally.
Hailing from Chhattisgarh’s Raipur, Syed says the tormenting experience of finding a house in Mumbai was what formed the thematic base for the short. “From seeing big bungalows back home, I was here in Mumbai, looking at 400 square feet flats which I had to share with three other people,” he reminisces. “It was doubly-difficult in my case, firstly because I work in the film industry and secondly because I am a Muslim.”
He remembers that when he and two of his other friends finally got their dream flat (“With TV and recliners”) it had a termite infestation. “Before that I didn’t know there was a thing called ‘flying termites’,” he says with a laugh.
In the film, the protagonist often feels that there is a presence in the house, that he hasn’t moved into a vacant apartment. “A lot of times when we were searching for houses, the broker used to take us to flats with people already there. It felt weird just to walk into somebody’s everyday life and peep into it,” says Syed.
Chaar Diwari premiered at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival as the festival’s only Indian selection and won the Bronze Audience Award and Best Asian Short. It boasts Anurag Kashyap and Ranjan Singh as presenters. Syed says getting Anurag’s name on the film was surprisingly easy. “I dropped a cold text to Anurag sir on WhatsApp. I had his number from before because we have some mutual friends. He replied in a few hours asking me to send a link for the film. When he saw it, he said he is happy to give his name to it," he says.
When we speak to him about genre, Syed describes himself as an ardent horror fan. “I pester everybody for a horror story,” he says. “Over the years I have developed kind of a repository of scary stories which I have heard over the years.” Besides the thrills and chills of the genre, he also thinks horror films can convey deeper emotions subtly. “I have always been a fan of elevated horror, although I don’t necessarily like the terminology. I like to call it the horror of implication, where you are implying something much bigger than just defining an entity, a ghost, or a monster,” he says. “What if the walls of your house that are supposed to protect you, they become your biggest nightmare? In a way my film is like Obsession, it's about a wish gone wrong."
During the conversation, Syed also talks about how he believes certain houses he lived in were “haunted” (“We found the crosses upside down everyday in a Catholic house”). To round-off the chat, we ask him if he really believes in the supernatural. “Oh, a 100 per cent,” he says. “Life becomes more entertaining if you believe in ghosts."