‘Chaar Diwari’ interview: Syed Shadan on the horrors of renting in Mumbai and why Hindi cinema keeps chasing formulas
Filmmaker Syed Shadan discusses his award-winning short film 'Chaar Diwari', which uses the horror genre to explore the anxieties of Mumbai's housing crisis. The film reflects a shift in Indian cinema toward using psychological horror to address contemporary urban issues.
Why it matters
The film highlights how independent creators are using genre fiction to critique social and economic pressures in modern Indian cities.
For a country that keeps producing entirely new reasons to lose sleep, Indian horror has remained frustratingly committed to recycling old ones. Haunted havelis, cursed villages, ancestral sins, forgotten folklore — the genre seems to have exhausted every original idea that doesn’t involve turning to the past as an inexhaustible source of terror. But upcoming filmmaker Syed Shadan’s Chaar Diwari points the camera somewhere considerably more contemporary. Premiered at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival as the festival’s only Indian selection and winning the Bronze Audience Award and Best Asian Short, the independently produced psychological horror film builds off an experience familiar to almost every young Mumbaikar: a broker saying, ‘ ek perfect flat hai. ‘
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