This Friday, Munjya — based on the supernatural creature of the same name common in Maharashtrian folklore — swings into theatres. A part of the Stree-Bhediya horror-comedy universe, Munjya stars Sharvari, Abhay Verma, Mona Singh and Sathyaraj and is helmed by Aditya Sarpotdar, who has earned his stripes in Marathi cinema. A t2 chat.

In a market where films are largely not working at the box office, Munjya seems to be a clutter breaker...

Yes. Every response that we have got till now says that the film appears to be a clutter breaker, whether it is the trailer or the songs. It looks different, it sounds different and seems to be a different kind of narrative.

We always intended the film to be a big-screen experience. Getting people to the theatres nowadays has become a difficult task. You need to promise them something out of the box. So far, things have landed right for us. Everyone is saying that Munjya appears to be a fresh film and promises something unique.

How did Munjya happen?

I have been making Marathi films for the last 14 years. I was looking at making a transition into cinema that would have a wider audience reach. Hindi cinema gives a bigger platform and a bigger audience. My last Marathi film Zombivli is a horror-comedy that was received well. It released after the pandemic and a lot of non-Marathi people took notice of the film because the genre is very different. It is a unique zombie film made as a comedy, which I don’t think has been attempted after Go Goa Gone.

That got me a lot of inquiries from the Hindi film industry because even Bollywood is looking for subjects that fit into the horror-comedy genre. But again, I feel that there has been a lot of saturation in this genre in the last few years with films that haven’t had great stories to tell.

I was jamming in that space with the Maddock (Films, the producers of Munjya) team and I happened to tell them that my hometown is in the Konkan region of Maharashtra and during my childhood, I had heard a lot of horror legends about Munjya, which, according to folklore, are the spirits of young boys who reside in peepul trees.

Maddock Films was pretty excited because they had a work-in-progress script in that same space written by Yogesh Chandekar. They asked me to
team up with him and get it into a screenplay format. If it worked, then we could make a film. Yogesh wrote a banger of a script and we started setting up the project.

What are the key things that need to be kept in mind while writing a horror comedy?

The most important thing is the relatability of the film. People have to understand and relate to it. Horror comes from the space of the unknown. It is the fear of the unknown. But the world that you are setting the fear of the unknown in has to be one that you understand and relate to and which you also find unique.

Films like Stree and Kantara have worked because they got that right, even as they weaved in folklore. There is a Malayalam film called Romancham which is a very exciting horror comedy. All these films have been set up in their own regions and have stories that come from their own folklore. That creates a massive relatability. In that you create your laughs and scares because you know that your subject matter is going to lend to the scares and laughs.

But if you are looking for a generic story and then write gags around it, it will end up being a little crass because it will neither be horror nor a generic comedy film. Munjya was exciting for me purely because of the story of Munjya. If there was no element of Munjya in it and it was just a generic horror comedy, I wouldn’t have even done it.

Being a part of the Stree-Bhediya horror-comedy universe must have its advantages but does it also put the pressure of expectations on you?

The pressure comes a lot more from the audience expectations than from the maker. People want to tie up every film now because Maddock has announced that it is a franchise. It is these fan theories that are creating that pressure.

Munjya was never intended to be a follow-up or a prequel to Stree. That kind of narrative never works. I also believe that for a film to work in a franchise, it has to work as a standalone film in the first place. There is no point in people coming to watch a bad film just because it is part of a franchise. Munjya has a little bit of a connection to that universe but we were primarily going for a standalone narrative of Munjya, of what it is.

We were clear that we wanted to avoid crossover casting. We didn’t want to confuse the audience by casting characters from Bhediya and Stree. The idea was to create a film that stands at the same quality as Stree and Bhediya.

What would you count as the toughest bit to pull off in making Munjya?

That would be creating Munjya. When you are creating a ghost or a creature, you need to convince the audience what they have heard of but not seen. If you see any good horror film, you always fear what you don’t see, you fear what you imagine and are not shown. Even in Stree, one gets to see ‘Stree’ only in the last scene.

But Munjya is going to be seen throughout the film. You will stop fearing him the more you see him because you get more used to him. For me, the challenge was to keep that fear alive, to make him scary enough and to build him as a character that came across as exciting yet scary.

We decided to take the CGI route because we wanted him to physically do things that humans can’t do. Creating a VFX CGI character that talks and emotes around live actors and who is a protagonist in a film has never been done before in Indian cinema. We have seen a lot of CGI films but we have never seen the protagonist being CGI in a film.

We got DNEG, Double Negative, which is one of the biggest VFX studios in the world. VFX supervisor Brad Minnich, who has worked on all the Justice League movies and Aquaman and DC film series, came down from LA and worked here for 18 months. We realised that if Munjya works, then the film works.

Did you always envision Munjya in the form that it is in the film? It does give a Gollum in The Lord of The Rings vibe...

It is going to remind people of Gollum for sure because there are a lot of parallels to Gollum in terms of what Munjya is. Folklore goes that Munjya is always tied to peepul trees and we felt that Munjya needed to have an excellent body that was kind of tree-like because he has to merge into that world. He is a Brahmin boy and he had to have a small braid. He is essentially a kid and had to be small in size. Even Gollum is a tiny frail thing. We had to make Munjya mysterious and lovable and that is also what Gollum is. But when you watch the film, you will see that there is no reference or connection to the fact that we have tried to recreate Gollum.

When we were thinking about Munjya, Gollum did come up in a lot of our conversations. They both share a madness to seize what they love. Munjya is going for his girl in the same way as Gollum went for the ring. But the story and the world are very different in Munjya.

This year, Bollywood has taken a beating in many ways but regional cinema has taken over the box office. How have you seen Marathi cinema evolve over the last few years?

Marathi cinema started evolving from 2005. This revolution happened because young, new filmmakers started to move towards Marathi cinema. Usually, the young filmmakers from Maharashtra would assist Hindi filmmakers and aspire to make a film in Hindi. But that started changing because they found their own voice and a way to tell great stories in Marathi.

In Marathi cinema, the budgets are in control and hence they can take risks in telling stories that are unique. Also, there has never been any pressure for Marathi films to have star power. The star of the film is the script and then the director. That gives a great platform for good cinema to be made. What you see happening in Malayalam cinema is similar.

Marathi filmmakers understood that the audience is never going to come to theatres to watch an actor. They are going to come to the theatre to watch the film and the actor will do well if the film does well. Sairat, the biggest hit in Marathi, has two newcomers as leads. We don’t compete with Hindi cinema. We want to stand out and look different.

Post Sairat, the corporates coming into the Marathi industry gave a good structure to how films were made and distributed. What Marathi cinema still struggles with is the marketing and distribution of films. Even today, we compete with the same campaign rates — be it hoardings or newspaper ads — that Hindi cinema does. We share the same space and operate on the same level as big Hindi films because we are based in Mumbai. Unlike us, the cost of promoting and distributing a film in Kerala is very low. We directly compete with the marketing and distribution cost of Hindi films. That is where the struggle is very real.