Savouring shudder with F.U. Ramsay

On a spooky rainy day, a phlegmatic, baggy-suited patriarch sat at the head of a table, encircled by his burly, rose-complexioned sons. He could have been a Don Corleone presiding over a strange cubist one-storey building on Mumbai’s busy Grant Road. Corleone Jrs refilled his mug of beer incessantly, insisting that I should keep pace with their old man, and filled in every pause in our conversation, with the offer of a bowl of cashewnuts. “Masala kaajus,” the Godpapa informed helpfully. “You will enjoy.”

That I did, the beer-flooded afternoon stretching to a tandoori chicken dinner. The genial host, F.U. Ramsay, with his brood of sons and their wives, comprised the horror factory which became a brand but vanished somewhere between the cracks. I suspect as Daddy Ramsay aged, the sons and bahus, sought to go their separate ways. This Sindhi family, which had adopted a pseudonym surname, specialised in quickie, blood-and-skeleton shuddernamas. Comfortable in their zone, they never felt the need to hanker for an exalted status in the Bollywood market.
More’s the pity because they were one of a kind, the badshas of B-grade products catering to an audience which adored ghosts with acid-burnt faces, grinning gorillas, witches displaying fangs more lethal than Rampuri knives and tantric spirits popping red-vined eyeballs. The locations would feature arthritic-ridden doors opening to cobwebbed havelis, jungles infested with angry young cobras, not to forget graveyards housing the living dead. The stories would be derivative of the American and William Castle’s British horror movies but repackaged in a style which was distinctly indigenous. Ramsays’ vampires would have taught Count Dracula a trick or two in the art of creating the creepy-crawlies.
The view of the intelligentsia — critics and balcony audiences — was that Ramsays hack out trashy flicks which are to be scoffed at. In fact, the don was startled that he was actually being interviewed for a colour spread in The Illustrated Weekly of India. The grand old man smelt a rat, looked at me with his watery eyes, and intoned, “I know why you have come here. To make fun of us.” The sons instantly corrected him, “No, no, he’s not like that. He likes our films.” Don nodded sceptically.
So much beer has passed under the Grant Road Bridge since that day. I don’t think I can ever meet the brothers under the same roof ever again. And there’s no keeping track of the extended family tree either with its branches going hither and thither. The family’s official screenwriter Keshu Ramsay produces extravagantly-budgeted films, and has dropped his surname from the credit titles. To launch his son, Aryeman, he produced Family: Ties of Blood toplined by Amitabh Bachchan and Akshay Kumar. In vain. On the few occasions, I’ve bumped into Keshu, he avoids any rewind to those lager-than-life days.
It was Keshu who wrote the screenplays and dialogue for the countless number of the screamfests. Brothers Tulsi and Ramsay handled the direction, Kiran designed the sound and Gangu was the cinematographer. Names of the Lady Ramsays, Kanta and Anjali, would show up as producers. That the family had a flair for horror was apparent as soon as Ek Nannhi Munni Ladki Thi (1970) was released at the smaller cinema halls, featuring Prithviraj Kapoor no less and Mumtaz, before her prime, in the eponymous part of a young woman bedevilled by assorted demons. Directed by Vishram Bedekar, subsequently the Ramsays took charge of every department with Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche (1972). Photographed mostly at night, this was Mumbai’s first pure horror flick, guaranteed to send shudders up the spine. A duplicitous woman, with her paramour, murders her husband, buries him in an incredibly deep grave. Next: the dead man returns to throttle the illicit lovers. Even critics loved this one for its technical fluidity and tight story-telling. It was nominated for the just-initiated Critics’ Award. The Ramsays were rocking.
Unknowingly perhaps, they had taken the horror genre to another level from the mystery thrillers — like Mahal, Bees Saal Baad, Kohraa, Gumnaam and Woh Kaun Thi? which had always kept contact with the rational element. For the Ramsays horror meant sex and retribution (adapted weakly of late by Ragini MMS), outraged temple priests and innocent wayfarers who sashay into a swamp, not as cool as Transylvania perhaps, but designed atmospherically enough at the lowest-cost studios in show town.
And the films’ titles left nothing to the imagination. Examples: Veerana (The Wilderness), Dahshat (Fear), Bandh Darwaza (The Closed Door) and Purana Mandir (The Old Temple). None of them were particularly memorable for their music scores though. They mostly featured actors on the skids, edited at hurricane speed and ensured more value for money than other horror films of the time (Jadu Tona and Gehrayee, both betraying shades of The Exorcist).
Followed a lull, a disappointing deviation to television with the Zee Horror Show, and then the inevitable: the closure of the factory where creatures went bump in the night. To be honest, that beer-cashew encounter with F.U. Ramsay and Sons had almost escaped my mind till I met a film studies student from the US last week. He is working on a thesis re-evaluating the Ramsay horror flicks. He has little research material to go by, there is no memorabilia either. Can’t be helped. It’s only years later that you miss what’s no more.

The writer is a journalist, film critic and film director