RGV’s scary visit to Hyderabad

On an pleasantly cold Sunday morning, many a scribe watching the trailer of Ram Gopal Varma’s latest release, ‘Phoonk’, felt a chill running down their spines when the man himself said, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you”, before taking his seat in PVR Cinemas to address the press conference. The maverick filmmaker sat among the audience at the event to promote his film about black magic and was content to observe media reactions as gripping images of a young girl tossing a lemon, flashed on the screen.

Then there were scenes that showed a little girl rising vertically from her bed a la ‘Exorcist’, even as the output from the audio systems made the atmosphere a wee bit chilly. One after another, the trailers took the audience through a seemingly-unforgettable journey, revealing darker scenes designed to give children nightmares and scare the living daylights out of adults. ‘Phoonk’ is an inspiration from our very own by Yandamoori Veerendranath’s book ‘Tulasidalam’.

“It is about how black magic affects an atheist’s family and a few unexplainable situations that shake the foundation of his convictions and belief systems,” said Varma. Why a movie on black magic? “No one has ever made a movie on black magic thus far. There have been films about demonic forces, like ‘Bhoot’, ‘Vaastu Shastra’. Moreover every country has got some form of dark magic and I wanted to make one on it,” Ramgopal Varma said. However, Ram Gopal Varma himself does not believe in it. “I am an atheist to the core. My film talks about positive and negative forces, which I would not like to believe in. I’m a rationalist,” he said and signed off.