The Halloween festival is celebrated in the United States by trick-or-treating and apple bobbing. In India, Halloween is marked by watching horror films – as if an excuse is needed.

The genre has slid into comedy of late, with laughs deemed as necessary as screams. Social horror is catching on too, with a message tucked into the scares. Horror fans who seek a pure experience, the kind that intends only to scare the living daylights out of them, can turn to Raat.

Made in both Telugu and Hindi, Raat is from the decade when Ram Gopal Varma could do no wrong. He directed Raatri/Raat in 1992, the same year he made his other bilingual Antham/Drohi (which inspired his masterpiece Satya in 1998).

In Raat, there are no signs of a director in a hurry. Every frame, every sound exists for a reason.

The 127-minute movie jangles the nerves in the opening sequence itself. The camera darts about a depopulated place, as if in search of something or someone. A woman gets off a bus and walks around. She comes across a parked car, sees something in it and screams. The entity corners her in a darkened room. Then she wakes up.

Mini (Revathy) has been warned, though she doesn’t know it yet. The college student has relocated with her parents (Rohini Hattangadi and Akash Khurana) and her nephew Bunty (Atit) into a new house with a basement and old secrets. Strange things start to happen to Mini’s boyfriend Deepak (Chinna), Bunty and Mini herself.

While Raatri is available on Prime Video, Raat is out on YouTube and ZEE5.

Apart from Mani Sharma’s sinister background score, the film superbly uses everyday sounds – a food blender, a running motorcycle – to startle viewers. One of the most spine-chilling scenes takes place in a cinema hall. Varma emphasises loneliness and alienation in urban settings and in the daytime, themes that he revisited in his blockbuster Bhoot (2003).

Although Raat was credited with taking horror cinema away from fog-filled Gothic imitations and Ramsay-type creature features, the movie did have an ancestor in Aruna-Vikas’s The Exorcist-inspired Gehrayee (1980). What Raat did was to create a bridge between the Ramsay productions and slickly produced horror thrillers starring well-known actors.

Raat establishes its credentials with the powerhouse actor Revathy in the lead and other performers such as Rohini Hattangadi, Akash Khurana, Anant Nag and Om Puri. Ram Gopal Varma treats Raat just like he did his other better productions.

The movie is crisply written, tautly paced and deftly performed, with superb use of close-ups, silences and jump scares. There is no flab, nothing more or less. It is as promised: a never-ending night of terror.

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