Now, writer-turned-director Anees Bazmee is all set to unleash a fury of jitters. His Deewaangee features Urmila Matondkar (who featured in the suspense thriller, Kaun), along with Ajay Devgan and Akshaye Khanna. The latter also featured in Humraaz.
While Akshaye played crooked in Humraaz, he is more straightlaced in Deewangee, said to be inspired by Gregory Hoblitt's Primal Fear. "You could say it is partly inspired by that source," agrees Urmila, but adds, "You cannot remake a hardcore thriller like Primal Fear without softening the blow."
A major impediment in constructing believable thrillers in Hindi is the image of the stars. In Hollywood, casting major stars as victims and killers in whodunits is nothing new. In Bollywood, producers have to be careful of the actor's image while casting him in a negative mould. In Khoj, the Hindi adaptation of To Chase A Crooked Shadow, Rishi Kapoor played his wife Kimi Katkar's killer. The film bombed and the actor stuck to conventional roles.
The current breed of stars are game to playing dark roles. Their willingness to discard their images has infused new vigour in the genre of suspense thrillers.
Right after Anees Bazmee's Deewaangee, there is Sangeeth Sivan's Sandhya. It is the story of a psychotic killer on the prowl, written by the late actor Amjad Khans son Shadaab Khan.
Raveena Tandon starred earlier this year in the whodunit Soch, and says she enjoyed the chilling ambience of Sandhya. "Thrillers have no repeat value. Once the audience knows who the killer is, there is no charm left. Sandhya will still shock viewers."
Raveena's colleague Karisma Kapoor is also busy screaming on the sets of the thriller Baaz, where she plays an enigmatic stranger grappling with the attention of three men Suniel Shetty, Jackie Shroff and Dino Morea. Karisma is thrilled to bits since she has never done a suspense thriller before.
The provocative genre is growing in popularity since suspense films take relatively shorter period of time to be completed.
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