Book Reviews Meraj Ahmed Mubarki, Filming Horror: Hindi Cinema, Ghosts and Ideologies. Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2016, 216 pp., US$45 (Hardback). ISBN: 978-9-3515-0872-4. Meheli Sen, Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre, and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017, pp. 264, US$27.95. ISBN 978–1-4773– 1158–5. Assessing the field of Indian film studies a few years ago, Rosie Thomas wrote “now that the discipline has reached critical mass and is ready for takeoff, it is urgent that we encourage more stories to be told about Indian cinema” (2014, p. 3). In two important new books, Meraj Ahmed Mubarki’s Filming Horror (2016) and Meheli Sen’s Haunting Bollywood (2017), the focus is on India’s rich and understudied body of horror and supernatural films from the 1940s to the present. Answering Thomas’ call for genres of “fantastical and popular films” that have thrilled audiences for almost a century to “be reinstated and given proper attention within Indian cinema history” (p. 7), Filming Horror and Haunting Bollywood range across gothic thrillers of the 1950s and snake films of the 1970s, monster movies of the 1980s, and possession pictures of the 2000s. Analyzing these films for their ideological meaning and generic pleasures, Mubarki and Sen argue that the feudal mansions and mad scientists, vengeful spirits, and priestly exorcisms of Hindi horror cinema release what has been repressed by postco- lonial discourses of urban modernity, scientific rationality, and state-sponsored secular pluralism. Their close attention to narrative, formal compositions, sounds, and special effects reveal the textual operations of genres that subtend and subvert Bombay cinema’s melodramatic and masala mainstream. While similar in corpus, the distinctive strength and appeal of Mubarki and Sen’s books come from significant variations in structure, periodization, operating theoretical premises, and kinds of textual evidence deployed. Together, Filming Horror and Haunting Bollywood suggest exciting new directions for the growing subfield of Indian horror film studies. Consider, for example, agreements and differences in the authors’ reading of the gothic thriller. Following the end of British colonial rule in 1947, Bombay’s studios produced a series of popular gothic thrillers including Mahal (trans. The Mansion, Kamal Amrohi, 1949), Madhumati (Bimal Roy, 1958), Woh Kaun Thi? (Raj Khosla, 1964), and Bees Saal Baad (Biren Naug, 1962). In these films, urban-rationalist heroes are beck- oned to faraway rural mansions by rumors and intuitions of supernatural haunting. Inverting the protagonist’s “modernizing” journey from the village to the city as seen in contemporary social films like Shree 420 (Raj Kapoor, 1955), Mahal instead pulls the hero (and the viewer) into the gravitational orbit of a lush and decrepit haveli (manor), BioScope 8(2) 280–292 © 2017 Screen South Asia Trust SAGE Publications sagepub.in/home.nav DOI: 10.1177/0974927617728143 http://bioscope.sagepub.com