Horror-comedy is the most challenging genre: Filmmaker Aditya Sarpotdar

CHENNAI: Director Aditya Sarpotdar is on cloud nine as his recent films, Kakuda and Munjya are garnering positive responses from the audience. The base of both films are horror and comedy. Kakuda stars Riteish Deshmukh, Sonakshi Sinha and Saqib Saleem in the lead roles and is streaming in Zee5. In this interview, he delves deep into how the blend of horror and comedy is a challenging part and how a filmmaker’s intent is to deliver a good film, rather than focusing on whether it will be a hit or flop.

As the master of the horror-comedy genre, what inspired you to create Kakuda, and how did you ensure a perfect blend of humour and horror in this film?

The first venture I attempted in the horror-comedy genre was a Marathi film, titled Zombivli. It was about zombies in Dombivli and was very regional in its stakes. The horror-comedy landed well, garnering a lot of attention from the Hindi film industry. Kakuda was a unique story, set in the heartland of India, specifically around the Mathura-Uttar Pradesh-Rajasthan border, about a town that had a bit of a folklore about every house having two doors and a certain understanding in that town that it was a haunted town. The narrative, which the writers had already crafted when I came on board, intrigued me. I loved the fact that horror comedies with folklore or rooted narratives always capture the audience’s imagination. Horror and comedy are two drastically different emotions. You set up a moment of fear or a jump scare, followed immediately by laughter. This balance is the skill of the writers, the director, the actors, and eventually, it all comes together in the editing process. As a filmmaker, I’ve always been intrigued by challenging narratives and genres. I believe the horror-comedy genre is the most challenging of them all. It’s crucial that the humour comes from the world of horror and fear, lending itself to the core of the story. The jokes are derived from moments of fear because when the audience is truly scared, that moment can turn into laughter.

With the success of your latest film, do you feel any increase in the pressure of delivering another hit content?

The success of Munjya gave me a lot more confidence as a filmmaker. Munjya was a mid-budget film with no big stars and not a big promotional campaign, yet it did well at the box office. This success reassured me that the stories I want to tell, and the way I want to tell them, are being accepted by a wider audience. The only pressure now is to maintain the standard of cinema that the audience expects from me. When it comes to hits and flops, I’ve always believed that it is the filmmaker’s intention to make a good film that decides its fate. With Munjya, we never set out to make a hit film; we set out to make a good film that people would appreciate. The fate of a film depends on many factors beyond the film itself.