What’s a book or movie that genuinely scared you?
Fear, it is all about mindset as to how much it gets to you. I have learnt it through experience; there are moments when you are genuinely scared of something simple in nature and there are times when you emerge fearless in face of even the most challenging ordeal.
At the present stage of my life, I get scared by any movie, show, book of horror genre; what differs is the duration. My years of work as content editor has made it a habit to be more thoughtful about details of anything I am viewing or reading and combined with my already existing imagination, before you know the intensity has flowed out of the pages of a book or screen of a television and the supernatural is just outside the room door knocking. But that fear is still missing the depth and rawness that it once had for me, because I know in the back of my mind that it is not real.
I have had a brush with the supernatural before or I have interpreted them in that manner; there could always be a possible valid explanation. None of them were terrifying experiences, in fact one of them might have given me a peek into spirituality, but I am not too much mentally invested in it.
So actual raw, fear, that makes your senses go blank as the silence creeps in and makes the unusual cold apparent and drives the realm of existence beyond a certain line of belief; for this fear, one has to believe that those things in the horror books or movies, they can happen in reality. It is something rare to an adult mind but in the mind of a child things become interesting.
Hence, the genuine fear I felt was when I was still a child. My late maternal grandmother was the best story teller I have ever met in my life. She used to tell me stories of all genres, she would tell them from memory or she would read the stories out of a book. One of the horror stories she read out to me made me genuinely feel fear and it was very interesting so I would occasionally ask her to read it out to me again. She eventually bought me a cassette with the story recorded by professional voice over artists.
This story is a popular Bengali culture folktale, a part of an anthology of short stories published in a book called Thakumar Jhuli or Grandmother’s Bag of Stories. The introduction of this book was written by Rabindranath Tagore. The name of the story was Lalkamal-Neelkamal.
I won’t go too much into the details of the story but in brief, it was a story about a king, he had two queens, one a human and one a demoness. The queens had one son each who were very close to each other. The demoness begins to spread her terror, putting the king under her magic, killing the human queen, the human prince and also her own son for taking the side of the human prince. The princes are reborn and they fight to free the kingdom from the demoness queen.
On the surface it might feel like a simple story, but the most interesting part of the story is about the way it has been written, the way it gives the details and presents the scenario. The sound words used to add more horror elements. It is very interesting, just recalling it at this moment makes me want to sit and read it again.
I would like to feel this kind of genuine fear again through a well written book or a well-directed movie. Hope my imagination is able to carry me to that threshold once more.
Written by Anuran Chatterji
