Sinners and Khauf, two atmospheric works of the genre, reveal that true horror is never otherworldly; it lives in the grammar of everyday oppression

Indian Express

09-05-2025

The most potent horror is born from the everyday. It dwells in the mundane, resists the mundane, and seeks to reclaim what the mundane has long denied. True horror isn't found in the jump scare but in the silence that paralyses you, in the stillness that keeps you from leaping forward in life. It isn't the invisible terror that hides in shadows, but the one that stands plainly in the light: unavoidable, yet unnavigable. It is not the fresh wound, but the trauma that runs deep, that is ancestral, generational, neck-deep in history. It is always, without exception, sociological, psychological, political. It always, in every instance, wrests power from the marginalised. And soothes the ego of the privileged.
It's rare to witness even one horror tale in a year that truly embodies the ethos I just described. Rarer still is the appearance of two. Yet, that's precisely what happened last month, on April 18th. Two vastly different stories: distinct in language, form, format, and narrative style — emerged, stunned, and swept audiences in equal measure. One was Ryan Coogler's global juggernaut Sinners, the other a quiet, simmering Hindi web series titled Khauf, penned by Smita Singh. Both were horror at its most unflinching, cinema at its finest, and society at its most exposed. Watching them in succession is more than just a genre experience; it's a reckoning. A reminder that the most terrifying monsters aren't conjured; they're inherited. They live beneath our skin, waiting, always waiting, for the smallest crack to break through.
Both centre on the vulnerable, those reaching for what was never freely given. Both unfold in spaces they hope to reclaim, to remake as havens. And in both, the powerful intrude, unwilling to let them possess even the barest trace of what should have always been theirs. Each story holds within it characters who try to narrow the divide between the real and the uncanny, and others who sneer at the aspirations of the less privileged. They both begin in flight, from pasts soaked in grief, towards futures imagined in light. To new cities, new homes, chasing the promise of liberation. Only to find that what little they once held is stripped away, piece by piece. They end not with resolution, but with a glimpse of the desperate, devouring battle among the dispossessed, as the privileged stand untouched, spewing contempt, writing the story of violence while never having to live it.
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What's equally compelling is how, on the surface, both works appear to be conventional genre pieces: familiar in structure, obedient to the rules of the form. For the most part, they play the game as expected. But it is the lived, intimate experience of their creators, Coogler in Sinners, Singh in Khauf — that infuses these narratives with a resonant subtext: one heavy with the ache to survive, to belong, in a world that speaks only in the language of power and listens only to the voices of the privileged. Whether it's the historical struggle of Black and Brown communities in the Deep South, or the daily terror that haunts women in Delhi, both reveal a deeper truth. A realisation that the fears which grip us most are not those caused by the supernatural, but those woven into the fabric of the real. What's even more unsettling and profoundly revealing is how both works suggest that for the marginalised to claim power, they must first inhabit the very skin of their oppressors. It is only through possession, by becoming like them, speaking like them, behaving like them, that they are finally seen. But in that transformation, we do not transcend them. We become them.
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There is a deeper, more tragic realisation at play here: when we take up the weapons of the oppressor, we often mistake it for empowerment. We believe we're integrating, rising. But what we're truly doing is allowing their venom to seep into us, their violence to become our reflex, their agenda to dictate our path. We turn on one another. We silence our own. And in that struggle, we begin to lose not just our community, but the clarity of who we were to begin with. So whether it's Stack (Michael B. Jordan) in Sinners or Madhu (Monika Panwar) in Khauf, both are possessed, reshaped into monstrous reflections of those they once feared. And while they do, in time, gain the very power they once longed for, it comes at a steep cost: the loss of love, of tenderness, of self. The horror lies not just in what they become, but in how recognisable that becoming is. It reminds us that our oppressors are, in some way, versions of ourselves we never chose but were forced to emulate.
In the end, they do fight back, not to win more power, but to reclaim what was lost in the pursuit of it. Because the wounds we carry are not just reminders of pain. They are, perhaps, the only parts of us that remain uncorrupted. The only parts that still know how to survive. It feels almost poetic that much of this subtextual reckoning is not just written into the narrative, but embedded within the very fabric of craft. In Sinners, it is the sound design that ascends beyond the frame. Ludwig Göransson's score becomes a form of baptism, not in water but in rhythm. In Khauf, Pankaj Kumar's camera moves with an effortless precision, as if mirroring the city itself — restless, yet suffocatingly still when it needs to be.
What binds both works is a world-building that feels lived-in, not constructed. In Sinners, it's a town haunted by the ghosts of centuries-old racism — still breathing, still burning — where cultural appropriation wears the mask of reverence. In Khauf, it's a post-Nirbhaya Delhi where nothing has changed except the illusion that something has. A city where every woman's breath teeters between fear and anxiety. In this sense, these are not just stories; they are mirrors held up to a world that, regardless of era, form, or language, has always spoken in the dialect of domination. A world quick to pit the powerless against one another, where women's bodies are never their own, but battlegrounds — claimed, guarded, or destroyed in someone else's name.