I started off trying some drama, short films, romantic comedies, music videos. The whole gamut of work that I was getting. I always had a passion for genre, those are the movies that I grew up with. I thought of giving it a shot, as an experiment. So, we raised some funding for a short film that I produced myself. It was Moshari (The Mosquito Net), my first attempt at horror. While making it, whenever things felt too Hollywood, or like something that already existed, we would begin thinking about how to make it more Bangladeshi, more South Asian. , whether through music or any other element. It was about combining Bangladeshi culture, South Asian culture with the genre elements to create something unique. It was a fun experiment that ended up doing very well, winning South by SouthWest (SXSW), getting me an agent and a manager in the USA, and traction internationally.

Genre is a language in itself. It has a fan base internationally. They’ll find a Turkish horror movie, although they’d have never seen a Turkish drama. They will find an Indonesian action movie but they might have never seen an arthouse film from Indonesia. For them, genre is a culturally agnostic thing. That became a wonderful thing to tap into, especially being from Bangladesh, which has always been underrepresented. India, Pakistan are much bigger places, have a much more robust film industry. That became a great way to elevate Bangladeshi cinema in itself. But again, all these things have been accidental realizations. I was essentially just a kid trying to do something that I loved, and trying to tap into genre. I then continued developing it with Pett Kata Shaw, Dui Shaw, with everything else that I’ve been working on.

The combination of genre with our culture is organic. It works also because there’s a great history of literature and folktales in South Asia that go back to genre. Even our religious texts have supernatural elements. We've actually been growing up with genre without giving it that label. It’s now that we're trying to use the visual language to access that.

I would say it’s very similar. I think it was similar in the West as well, where Edgar Allan Poe is highly regarded as great literature but then films that are adapted from that are considered B grade, C grade. In Bangladesh, we've always had folk tales, some great literature that taps into the supernatural, but when it comes to film no one has really attempted it, and whenever they have, it's always been very kitschy.

We grew up on The Zee Horror Show and other Indian horror shows. I don't know if anyone talks about them as high art. But those are the things that have stayed in our heads. I remember another Indian horror show with a clown though I don't recollect its name.

When I started tapping into this space everyone around me asked me why I was attempting a horror short? That it’s not going to get into any festivals. I think that was almost like freedom. It was like I’m not making cinema, I’m not making art, so let me have fun with it.

I appreciate genre being undervalued because I think it gives that cult status that is more empowering for filmmakers. But I do think there’s always been great innovation in genre cinema in terms of the visual arts, whether you think of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, where he just did insane things with the camera, or if you even think of the origins of horror cinema coming from French New Wave and the bizarre cinema there.

There is a commercial factor to it as well that you can’t deny. One of the biggest sales in Sundance in 2025 was a film called Together that Neon ended up acquiring. The biggest acquisitions are happening in the genre space.

If you look at the US, a lot of the new original films are genre films. They are doing well because they’re made on a very low budget but are recouping it. Audiences are excited to go see such a film even if they’ve never heard the director’s name, even if there’s no big cast attached to it. In fact, it sometimes hurts genre when there’s a big cast attached because you don’t want to see Tom Hanks or Angelina Jolie running away from a ghost. When it’s a raw face you’ve never seen, it actually helps you immerse yourself in that kind of film. You just have to watch the trailer, hear the concept, and be like that sounds fun. The success of the medium is empowering for a lot of young filmmakers who want to break into that scene. In fact, the studio genres are not doing as well as some of these indie ones. There is this rebellious spirit as well, along with the commercial aspect, that anyone can go make it, and as long as the concept is interesting, it can, capture audiences’ attention.

The reality is some things take up more space in a moment than others. For a big time, it was a superhero film. But I think the problem with that space is that those films cost $100 million or $200 million, and then they have to make $500 to $600 million for a profit.

Saying something about society through genre is not a new concept. Ari Aster, Jordan Peele, even way before that, if you look at the original zombie movies, they were trying to say something about capitalism or society. The idea of a zombie is just people being mindless, which ties into what’s happening in the society. I’m not working with the biggest budgets in the world when I’m doing these things in South Asia. Even if I have big budgets, I don’t have access to the craziest prosthetics or puppetry or special effects. I am limited by my surroundings, so I’m always thinking, more in a social sense, about what scares me? What terrifies me? What is wrong in society around me? I use those things as elements in my horror. You don’t need a budget to do something dramatic, and that can do a lot more than a jump scare sometimes. The jump scare itself is also important. I wouldn’t say that I’m not really doing genre, that it’s drama. Genre has always had drama in it, it’s always been two ways. But I think it is liberating to access deeper themes through it. I find it very empowering when someone watches my work and their favourite thing is a dialogue or a sentiment and not just the scares.

The wrong way to do genre in South Asia would be to just take those jump scares, just take those surface elements of what the West is doing, or take elements from Japanese horror, J-horror. Our way to do genre should be tapping into our own stories, and it should be, like, an inwards journey about how the intersection between our culture and genre can create something new. If we don't do that, then we're just remaking the same thing everyone else is doing. We need to find our own place. It's an experimental journey, but I've seen it being widely successful, even doing things on really low budgets, or on a platform called Chorki that not a lot of people are aware of internationally.

I’m a huge fan of horror in general, but I grew up with a lot of cinema. I always find the horror elements in certain movies really fascinating. Like Jurassic Park and Jaws. I consider them horror movies. Jurassic Park scared the crap out of me. When the dinosaurs attacked the car full of children and the family, it was really scary watching that as a child. Even watching something like Indiana Jones was very scary as a kid. I think what I’m trying to capture is the feeling of being a child and watching those movies. Something I try to avoid in my films is profanity. There’s a lot of violence and gore, but there’s no profanity. I want to make sure that the violence notwithstanding it is still something that you can watch with your younger cousins. It maybe a little too adult for them, but maybe that is their coming-of-age moment—watching something scary.

I’m more inspired by stories of djinns and village horror stories, by the folk origins of horror, and then I use very modern techniques to pull them off.  When I’m looking at technique, I’m looking at Jordan Peele, I’m looking at Ari Aster, I’m looking at Sam Raimi. I’m looking at them for how I can use the edits they’ve used, the sound design they’ve to tell stories that are very rooted in South Asia. I’d say I’m being inspired by my own stories, but I’m looking at the tools being used in 2025 to make it still feel modern, and not too kitschy, and not too inaccessible.

I think there are young creators, like Fantasia who had Ummid Ashraf’s genre short called Dhet! about a ride-sharing motorcyclist in Dhaka. These are really small steps. I don't think there’s been any major works in genre. There’s a global movement happening, and I don’t know if the next voice is going to come from Bangladesh necessarily, but I do think a lot of artists are realizing that combining their culture with genre elements leads to something refreshing.

There’s Moving Bangladesh that I’ve been developing for over three years. It is not in the genre space, it’s more a dramatic film. After working out that specific [genre] muscle for so long, I’m excited to tap into something that’s different. It is very much inspired by films like The Social Network, The Big Short, which I would say is a subgenre in itself. This fast-paced, tech movie, which we’ve seen in the West, but not as much in South Asia.