Turning chills to clicks: For these content creators horror is serious business
Forget late-night ghost stories—content creators are turning India’s folklore into popular, professionally made digital content
At 15, an age when he should have been reading comics, Divay Agarwal, the co-founder of YouTube horror channel Khooni Monday, was visiting some of Delhi’s notorious haunted sites. The trigger, he says, was an inexplicable incident that happened to him. “We had an intimidating peepal tree opposite my home (in Delhi) and for some reason, I’d hallucinate that there were things in that tree. But the incident that still sends chills down my spine was when I was standing on my neighbour’s terrace one night, their jhoola just untangled and fell all by itself. I have no explanation for how that happened till date."
The incident unnerved Agarwal, but also pushed him to face the fear of the unknown. “I began watching horror movies late at night. I also began reading up on all kinds of ghost stories and supernatural stuff. And once I turned 15, I started visiting graveyards and forbidden places like the Malcha Mahal to investigate things for myself," Agarwal says.
While it may not have seemed obvious at the time, his teenage fascination with the paranormal would play a role when, as a 26-year-old, Agarwal went looking for ideas for a YouTube channel of his own. “I started studying the platform to see where the gap in terms of content was. I realised that there was no organised channel doing only horror stories in India. And that’s how I started my channel," he says.
The first episode that Agarwal made, with the help of a small team of animators, was a 3D animation video delving into Bengaluru’s popular Naale Baa lore. “The film Stree had just been released and so we decided to explore the original legend," Agarwal remembers. Today, that idea which started with one video— “we’d gained 1 lakh subscribers within a month of launching the channel" —has grown into an entire ecosystem of horror content that includes original animated stories narrated in Hindi; a podcast called Ankhon Dekhi, where Agarwal interviews a range of people including horror content creators, makers of horror films, and paranormal investigators; and short-form content for Reels and Shorts. He has also launched HorrorCon, a live event bringing horror enthusiasts together.
“If you dive deep into horror as a genre there’s a lot you can work with," Agarwal says. Other horror content creators we spoke to agree. The scope of the genre has expanded in a world where everyone’s perennially online. Spooky campfire tales have moved online, with creators serving the scariest stories they can dig up along with eerie visuals and sound effects. And there’s a huge audience for it.
When you land on a post or a Reel on the Instagram handle @sunnysideupstorys, created by US-based software engineer Amit Juneja, it’s hard to ignore the creepy tune that plays on it. Scroll a little down and the visuals – created using AI and some editing software – are equally chilling. “I wanted people to get back into the habit of reading, so I began by writing quirky stories but they barely got any likes or views. I then switched to writing short spooky stories not longer than 300 words. That just clicked," shares the 35-year-old. Created as a page for original horror fiction, the page today has a 124k-strong follower count with some of the stories racking up over 50 million views. Particularly popular are Juneja’s “horrorified" takes on popular Bollywood films like Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham and 3 Idiots.
DEEP DIVES
In 2018, Bengalurean Sandesh Shenoy, 47, started a venture called Bollywood Crypt to sell merchandise such as t-shirts and posters of cult Indian horror flicks like Veerana, Bandh Darwaza, and Mahakal. Today, Shenoy has diversified into creating horror content for social media. A subject matter expert on Indian and south-east Asian horror films, Shenoy has found his sweet spot in doing extended interviews with cast and crew of Indian horror flicks from the 1970s and 80s —particularly Ramsay films that he grew up watching.
For Shenoy, the fun in doing these interviews lies in getting a first-hand account of how the films were made along with unravelling less known trivia. “When I interviewed Tulsi Ramsay and his son, Deepak Ramsay, some years back, they revealed that during a shooting of one of the films, they ended up exhuming a body at a location. And in a recent interview with actor Satish Shah, he talked about how he developed skin sensitivity due to prosthetics he had to wear while shooting Purana Mandir," Shenoy says. The fillip to conduct such interviews comes from the posts going viral. His interview with actor Aniruddh Agarwal, who essayed the role of the fearsome Saamri in Purana Mandir, has gained over 247k views.
“At Khooni Monday, the idea from day one was to make content that would scare people, we want the jump scares to be there, we want the build up to be there," says Agarwal who doubles up as the narrator on almost all the videos made by the channel. This ambition to create nail-biting content every single time – new videos are uploaded every Monday – translates to him and his 8-members team working hard on scripting stories, researching Indian and international mythologies and folklore, and even curating contributions from their subscribers. “We’ve managed to gather exhaustive material on different supernatural beings and myths over the years," Agarwal says.
With loyal viewers who eagerly wait for new updates, content creators like Agarwal, Juneja and Shenoy have found their footing. This has also opened up new avenues for them.
Agarwal is busy organising the second edition of HorrorCon, a two-day event being held in Delhi on 25-26 October, that brings lovers of horror stories together with creators and filmmakers. “It’s the second edition but we are going big this time," Agarwal says. Along with story-telling sessions and a horror cosplay, the event will also be hosting a horror short film competition. Shenoy has plans to launch new merchandise and host a Ramsay Horror Film Festival soon. Shenoy believes that horror content will always be popular. He says, “For fans of the genre, horror is catharsis, an extremely potent way to vent our emotions out. Which is why you have more people jumping on the band wagon to cash in on it."
As Tulsi Ramsay quipped long ago, “Let your fear line my pockets."
My favourite horror movies:
Sandesh Shenoy: Hellraiser, Evil Dead: Army of Darkness, The Thing, Bandh Darwaza, and Boxer’s Omen (Hong Kong).
Divay Agarwal: The Wailing (Korean), The Babadook, The Exorcist, Bhootakalam (Malayalam), and 13B (Hindi).
Amit Juneja: American Horror Story (TV show); Talk to Me, Oddity, Bring Her Back, and Sinners.
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