by Jana Monji, AsAmNews Art & Culture Writer
For most of us the evil eye is what your mother gives you when company is over and you’ve been socially awkward and should know better, but for others, it is part of their culture. Playwright and screen writer Madhuri Shekar built upon her cultural knowledge and wrote an audio play that was expanded into a movie, Evil Eye, that was released in early October as part of a Blumhouse Productions quartet on Amazon Prime Video.
When Shekar was invited to write a play for Audible, she recalls, “Immediately, my first thought was, ‘Oh, let me try to write a horror play.’ I always been curious about that genre.” With an audio play, you can’t see what’s going on and that can be pretty scary. Shekar asked herself, what would she like listen to? “I love listening to podcasts, but I find it hard to listen to narrative fiction on tape.” Because she likes hearing people talk she decided to make a whole play of just phone calls.
Born in California, but raised in India, Shekar is frequently on the telephone. “I talk to my mom every day on the phone. She lives in India; I live in the states.” As Shekar was pondering what kind of story she would write, her husband, who is not Indian, asked her what kind of trope from Indian culture she might be interested in exploring.
Evil Eye is about a mother (Sarita Choudhury) and daughter (Sunita Mani), separated by the Pacific Ocean. The mother and father (Bernard White) have returned to India. The 29-year-old daughter lives in New Orleans and has finally met the perfect potential husband (Omar Maskati): He’s tall, rich and Indian. However, the mother fears that the man may be the reincarnation of the controlling man she was involved with before she married her husband.
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Of course, Shekar noted, reincarnation is not meant to be a horror trope, but it could be scary. Growing up, the evil eye, karma and reincarnation were very much part of her upbringing. “I don’t really believe in any of that myself, but it is very much part of my cultural fabric.”
Unlike some of the cast members of Evil Eye, Shekar doesn’t carry a talisman. Still she feels that it is very commonplace for ethnic Indians to talk about those things. “The evil eye is something that my mom and I talk about a lot. Anytime I had a stroke of bad luck my mom says, ‘evil eye.'” Shekar also confessed, “My mother does do the warding off mantra over Facetime.” Because Shekar now has a baby boy, her mother insists it is for him.
Growing up, Shekar recalls, “I know that I was scared a lot; I was definitely scared of the dark; I was scared of monsters under the bed.” She caught “a tiny glimpse of the werewolf movie on TV before my mom could change the channel.” It was a campy 1950s black and white movie, but Shekar said, “I was just terrified of werewolves.”
Her mother was every vigilant. “My mom was very on top of not letting us watch scary movies; she wouldn’t even let us watch Jurassic Park; I still haven’t watched Jurassic Park.”
Although Shekar isn’t a big horror film fan, she did name her son after an Indian horror trope: Vikram. Shekar describes Vikram as a famous king who is the focal point of many children’s stories. He’s tasked with bringing the body of a corpse down from a tree, but before he can bring the body down, the corpse begins talking to him. The corpse then tells him a story and the king must tell him what the ethical thing to do. The catch is that if Vikram tells him the correct thing to do, the corpse will fly away back into the tree. This becomes a framing device for a series of Aesop fable-like stories because Vikram is a wise and moral king. A corpse that talks could be considered a zombie. The stories of Vikram were an Indian trope that Shekar did consider for her audio play, but the story didn’t come to her. For Halloween 2020, she is making her own story. “I’m going to dress Vikram (her son) up as a baby king and my husband and I are going to be zombies.”
Evil Eye is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
Here are Shekar’s suggestions for Halloween fare:
Chandramukhi (2005) is “a great South Indian movie about a ghost dancer, a dancer who is killed by this evil king.”
Clue (1985) is the first movie Shekar recommended for Halloween. Shekar likes “bright, fun, lovely, campy, confident movies.”
Karan Arjun (1995) is the story of two brothers who are killed and are reincarnated to avenge their deaths. “Evil Eye” was inspired by this film that Shekar characterizes as iconic.
Knives out (2019) Shekar finds this to be fantastic Thanksgiving movie.
Parasite (2019): This Korean film won as Oscar for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film.
Robot (or Enthiran ) is a 2010 film that Shekar has watched five times with her husband. “It’s about a scientist who builds a robot who looks exactly like him and then it falls in love with his girlfriend. The girlfriend rejects the robot and the robot goes evil. At one point, the robot replicates itself into a thousand identical robots and they all are joined together by magnets and they become a giant robot snake. It’s so bonkers, it’s so awesome.”
What We Do in the Shadows (movie (2014) and TV series, 2019 to present)
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