Horror movies seldom frighten me and I did not watch Phoonk hoping that it would. I was hoping, though, that it wouldn’t move me to fits of laughter (which it unfor­tu­nately did).

There’s no doubt that Ram Gopal Varma’s genre of horror is way better than the tradi­tional Ramsay Brothers’ formula. Even so, low expec­ta­tions is no excuse for making a mediocre film. Phoonk is a mixture of ideas taken from The Omen, The Exorcist and others, with an occasional attempt at cuteness. The under­lying theme is the usual one: a man who doesn’t believe in the super­nat­ural and his gradual trans­for­ma­tion into a believer. Perhaps this movie was aimed at an audience unfamiliar with those classic themes, but a little origi­nality would have been more than welcome.

I am also disap­pointed with the background score of the film. This is one of the most impor­tant elements of any movie, and is especially impor­tant for one that claims to scare its audience. Consider any well-received movie and you will find a fantastic score played at the right time and place, subtle yet effec­tive. In the case of Phoonk and such other films, there’s nothing but a suppos­edly scary piece of music played loudly at random inter­vals, making it quite hard to listen to the dialogue.

Cinema is a compo­si­tion of light and sound that requires careful timing, a plot built up at the right pace and a series of climaxes that enthralls the audience in one way or the other. Phoonk tries to be a ‘scary movie’ from the begin­ning to the end, and not surpris­ingly, it fails at this task.