Through the 1970s and 1980s, the Ramsay Brothers forged a career in the lower reaches of the Bombay film industry, creating a niche market for their cheaply produced horror films. Despite drawing committed audiences in B- and C-centers, these films were dismissed by the urban English press as clumsy counterfeit versions of American and British products, and by the late 1990s a new school of practitioners led by Ram Gopal Varma had begun producing slick and songless horror films that could translate internationally.
Little is known of the Ramsays’ production and distribution practices, their frugal discipline, their internal star system, and their markets in India’s rural territories. Using first-hand interviews and trade journals, this paper excavates the history of a cottage industry of terror that rode the same wave as Bombay’s blockbusters. It is perhaps perversely appropriate that the Ramsay Brothers rose to prominence in the 1970s, a time when the question of cinema—its politics, aesthetics, and status as “bad object”—returned to the fore in Bombay. Using essays and reviews from popular film magazines (especially Filmfare), as well as censorship documents from the CBFC archives, this paper navigates the discursive life of the Ramsay Brothers as a way to illuminate the fault-lines of taste over which cinema was popularly judged in the 1970s and 1980s.
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