Gods, Demons, Monsters, Witches: A Decade of South Asian Speculative Cinema

“Cinema is a mirror by which we often see ourselves.”

— Alejandro González Iñárritu

Cinema is a mirror of society, and like all good mirrors, it reflects the blemishes, contradictions, and inconvenient truths of the society that makes it. The turn towards speculative fiction (SF) in South Asian cinema in the last ten years is an example of this—it reflects a region grappling with polycrisis.

Two broad streams run through this decade in South Asian SF cinema: the mainstream mythological films such as Brahmastra (India, 2022), Kalki 2898 AD (India, 2024), and Umro Ayyar (Pakistan, 2024); and the smaller, more diverse, and socio-politically charged films from regional and independent filmmakers grounded in folklore, cosmic horror, and the supernatural. These streams rarely intersect. But despite their differences, both streams, in their own ways, respond to the same questions—of rising ethno-nationalism, caste and gender politics, climate change, geopolitics and economic instability, and anxieties over the region’s uncertain futures.

A Prehistory of South Asian Speculative Cinema

It is easy to lose sight of these trends in the absence of distinct, well-defined genre boundaries that characterize Western cinema but did not necessarily exist in South Asian cinema until recently. Mainstream South Asian films, colloquially known as ‘masala movies’, made before and immediately after Y2K usually occupied an intersection of several genres—they were often a mix of action, comedy, romance, drama, and the musical. While ghost stories and supernatural comedies existed as a distinct sub-genre within children’s cinema such as Bhoot Unkle (India, 2006) and Bhootnath (India, 2008), horror was often relegated to the domain of overtly campy or gory B-movies such as Billi (Pakistan, 2000) and Krishna Cottage (India, 2004). Hard science fiction—grounded in real-world scientific theories and discoveries—was rarer and remains so.

From 1963, when A. Kasilingam’s Tamil space opera Kalai Arasi—the first South Asian film to feature the concept of extraterrestrials visiting Earth—was released, to the present, the number of films which feature extraterrestrial characters can be counted on one hand: Wahan Ke Log (1967), Koi… Mil Gaya (2003), Red Rain (2013), PK (2014), and Ayalaan (2024) in India; Alien O Rumpar Golpo (2013) and Porobashinee (2017) in Bangladesh; and the 1989 cult classic Shani in Pakistan. Although South Asian film industries collectively produce over 2,000 films each year, speculative narratives have surprisingly remained at the margins of mainstream production despite commercial successes such as My Dear Kuttichathan (India, 1984)—re-released in Hindi as Chhota Chetan (1997)—and Mr. India (India, 1987), as well as rich, vernacular speculative literary traditions in Bangla, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, and Malayalam which exist across the region due to limited VFX technology and an overreliance on proven theatrical formats.

From the Margins to the Mainstream

The proliferation of streaming services across South Asia in the 2010s marked a major breakthrough for South Asian speculative cinema. South Asian filmmakers began incorporating speculative elements into their projects in the more liberal and experimental space provided by international platforms like Netflix, Prime Video, and Disney+. The decade from 2015 onwards represents a remarkable rise in South Asian speculative cinema. These films are often preoccupied with contemporary social anxieties of South Asia and rooted in regional and theological speculative frameworks. 

The 2018 Tamil film 2.0—a sequel to 2010’s Enthiran about a sentient robot—for example, expands on the original’s premise by focusing on the environmental consequences of technocratic development. The film’s antagonist is an ornithologist-turned-mad scientist who wants to avenge the death of birds caused by cellular towers. Despite its camp-comedic approach and factual inaccuracies about the science of robotics and the real-world reasons behind mass avian deaths in India, the film’s focus on ecological post-humanism, particularly on more-than-human agents, is a distinctive South Asian contribution to the global discourse on technology, humanity, and environmental accountability in the late Anthropocene. On the other hand, Arati Kadav’s Cargo (India, 2019), is set entirely on a spaceship where two rakshas, or demons, processes the souls of the deceased for reincarnation They are both transformed by the hopes, desires, dreams, regrets, and stories of the dead that will remain unresolved as they move on from one life to the next. A landmark for Indian speculative cinema, Cargo reframes Vedic philosophical concepts such as the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth through a retro-futurist lens to satirize the bureaucracy of death in India and examine the human—and non-human—need for connection.

Folk Horror as Political Metaphor

At the other end of the spectrum, regional films based on mythology and folk horror constitute an alternative approach to speculative cinema. Tumbbad (2018), Bulbbul (2020), Kantara (2022), and Bramayugam (2024) from India; the supernatural thriller Debi (2018)—based on Bangladeshi author Humayun Ahmed’s novel of the same name—Hawa (2022), and short films such as Moshari (2022) from Bangladesh and Vikaari (2020) from Sri Lanka, are part of this tradition. These films use the visual grammar of folk and supernatural horror to confront socio-political issues such as caste, gender, labour, colonialism, and communal violence with a level of shock that social realism fails to achieve. 

While Rahi Anil Barve’s Tumbbad, Rishab Shetty’s Kantara, and Rahul Sadasivan’s Bramayugam draw on the distinctive folkloric frameworks of coastal Maharashtra and Kerala to examine colonial greed and historical violence (Tumbbad) and feudal caste and class politics (Kantara and Bramayugam), Anvita Dutt’s Bulbbul, Anam Biswas’ Debi, and Mejbaur Rahman Sumon’s Hawa use a Bengali folkloric lens to examine how women’s experiences of gender violence are processed and dismissed, or worse, used to frame the victim as the aggressor by patriarchy. Bulbbul, Debi, and Hawa also frame the female body as a site of feminist struggle and resistance, following the broader folk-horror tradition across cultures, in which the figure of the witch or the possessed woman embodies patriarchal societies’ fears and anxieties about female autonomy. Set almost entirely aboard a fishing boat adrift at sea, Hawa takes the nightmare logic of Bangladeshi coastal folklore to an extreme to question the ecological anxieties of a country facing an existential threat from the rising seas and the eroding landmass of the Bengal delta due to climate change. Akin to Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015) and Nosferatu (2024), these films examine feminine transgression as a legitimate tool of resistance against patriarchy. Instead of demonizing women who transgress, they demonize the structures that make such transgression necessary.

The Speculative Cinema of Climate Anxiety and Postcolonial Trauma

Nuhash Humayun’s Moshari maps the psycho-geography of the Bengal delta’s climate vulnerability and the communal fault lines that continue to haunt South Asian post-colonial nations. Set in a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by vampires, Moshari follows two sisters as they navigate this world through forests, swamps, wetlands, and desolate settlements. Moshari works as a metaphorical horror on two fronts: on one hand, it draws on the horrors of the climate crisis which disproportionately affects the Global South; and on the other hand, it reflects the horrors of girlhood under patriarchy and the fragile, often claustrophobic protection—represented by the ‘moshari’ or mosquito net—women are forced to live under to remain safe from external predators. 

Similarly, the Sri Lankan short film Vikaari questions the persistence of superstition in rapidly modernizing societies. Vikaari—meaning ‘change’ in Sinhalese—follows the birth of children with supernatural abilities in an alternative world after Sri Lanka’s civil war, and uses this premise to examine how societies process the social other and the unresolved traumas of conflict. Both of these films use their speculative narratives to find the horror in specific, lingering social wounds.

Hindutva and the Mythopoeic Superhero Movie

This resistance to majoritarianism, authoritarianism, xenophobia, and patriarchy is not reflected in mainstream Indian films like Ayan Mukerji’s Brahmastra, which co-opted the Western superhero template and repainted it in Hindu cosmological colours to claim cultural sovereignty. Marketed as the beginning of the ‘Astraverse’, Bollywood’s answer to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Brahmastra was inspired by the divine superweapons of Hindu mythology. The film follows a young man who discovers an elemental connection to fire and gets pulled into a secret war over ancient ‘astra’, or cosmic weapons. Its much-mythologized production, from its long development and massive VFX budget to pan-industry casting, was itself a kind of nationalistic performance—a cinematic realization of the Hindu civilizational state’s fantasy of dharma or religion as superpower. Brahmastra had the makings of a film that could have brought the moral complexity, cosmological grandeur, and vast narrative potential of Hindu mythology accumulated over centuries of retelling to the modern superhero saga. Instead the film used this rich source material as reference for overdone visual effects and reduced it to a generic good versus evil narrative with CGI fireballs. The result was an empty tentpole so engrossed in its own franchise ambitions that it overlooked the story and world-building necessary to sustain such a project. 

The critical failure of Brahmastra raised the question of whether Hindu mythology could function as the basis for genuine speculative worldbuilding, or whether its sacred, quasi-religious status makes it resistant to change and reinvention that speculative cinema requires. The ‘what if?’ question essential to all speculative media requires the audience to engage with alternative belief systems and logical reasoning, to experience familiar stories through unfamiliar framing, and follow it with intellectual and emotional openness. This is hard to apply to Hindu mythology for a majority of the Indian audience who do not think these stories are open to interpretation—for them, these stories are a theological framework rather than a speculative one.

Nag Ashwin’s Kalki 2898 AD, in contrast, succeeded where Brahmastra could not. The Telugu superhero saga is set in a distant dystopian future—precisely 2898 AD—in the world of Mahabharata, six thousand years after the epic’s events, where the city of Kashi stands as the last bastion of humanity. A mysterious 200-year-old god-king, Supreme Yaskin, who resides in the ‘Complex’—a massive, inverted pyramid accessible only to the upper echelons of society—rules over this last living city. Fertile women from the outskirts of the city are abducted and artificially inseminated by Supreme Yaskin’s forces to harvest a life-extending serum from the pregnancies to prolong his life—evoking a haunting real-world parallel to Israel’s alleged state-sanctioned theft of organs and tissue from Palestinians. The film’s central conceit, the imminent birth of Kalki—the final avatar of the Hindu deity Vishnu, similar to the second coming of Christ in Christian mythology—from one of these forced pregnancies combines the desert politics of Dune, the wasteland violence of Mad Max, and the ethical ambiguity of the Mahabharata with more contemporary questions of eugenics, surrogacy, and reproductive politics. It is gloriously maximalist in its ambition and pan-Indian casting, featuring some of the most prominent and promising names of Indian cinema, from veterans like Amitabh Bachchan, Kamal Hassan, Saswata Chatterjee, and A-listers like Deepika Padukone to emerging actors from all major regional film industries.

Kalki 2898 AD is surprisingly pluralistic and syncretic for a film so ostensibly inspired by Hindu myths. Nag Ashwin takes inspiration from the Christian myth of the immaculate conception to explain the miraculous arrival of Kalki as the messianic child; draws on the Tibetan Buddhist myth of Shambhala—also known in the West as ‘Shangri-La’—a hidden kingdom in the Himalayas as the last stand of the rebels; and invokes the pre-Islamic, Zoroastrian creator deity Ahura Mazda of ancient Persia (present-day Iran and adjacent regions of West Asia) as one of the many names of the messianic figure who reappears across time and cultures. The film gestures towards a pantheistic approach, attempting to reconcile the Hindu concept of avatars with similar ideas of messianic reincarnation in Christianity, Buddhism, and other religions, and, in doing so, makes overtures toward a secular, pluralistic outlook in a political climate that makes such overtures rare.

Brahmastra and Kalki 2898 AD, irrespective of the filmmakers’ intention, also serve a political purpose: they emerge from and circulate within a cultural ecosystem which positions the Hindu civilisational identity as the only narrative of Indian nationhood that matters. Neither film needs to be a conscious propaganda exercise to fulfill this purpose. They reflect and reinforce the idea of India as a ‘Hindu’ ethnostate simply by normalising Hindutva as the foundation of the Indian identity—not one stream among many, but the wellspring itself.

Dominic Arun’s Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra (India, 2025), based on the Aithihyamala—a centuries-old collection of Malayalam folklore—stands out as a counterpoint to this Hindutva hegemony. This Malayalam superhero film (arguably the first) brings supernatural beings such as Kalliyankattu Neeli, a yakshi or vampire, Chathan, a mischievous goblin-like entity, Odiyan, a shape-shifting male spirit, and the immortal messianic figure Moothon from the domain of Malabar folklore to the modern superhero film. Dominic Arun and his co-writer Santhy Balachandran slip in social commentary and critiques of India’s political zeitgeist throughout the film: a subplot revolves around organ trafficking; a stalker threatens a woman with acid and suffers the protagonist Chandra’s wrath in one of the earliest action scenes of the film; and the television news media labels Chandra a “terrorist” under India’s draconian anti-terror laws when she goes on the run, echoing how mass media is often used against dissidents in the real world.

The New Language of South Asian Speculative Cinema

Several distinct thematic preoccupations recur across these films, separating South Asian speculative cinema from its Western counterpart while addressing both regional concerns and universal human experiences. The ethics of artificial intelligence and robotics are particularly prevalent in films like Enthiran and its sequel 2.0, Ra.One (India, 2011), Anukul (2017), and Android Kunjappan Ver 5.25 (India, 2019), which explore the implications of sentient robots within moral frameworks embedded in South Asian cultures. Unlike Western science fiction cinema’s focus on AI rebellion and technological anxiety, rooted in humanist concerns about human obsolescence, South Asian cinema frames artificial intelligence through the lens of duty and service, positioning humanoid robots as ethical actors whose arcs stem from moral alignment and relational commitments rather than from technological superiority. Sujoy Ghosh’s Anukul—based on a short story by Satyajit Ray—is a great example of this. Set in a near-futuristic Kolkata where androids are replacing human domestic workers, the film centres on the relationship between an ageing teacher and his android housekeeper, exploring the ethical implications of robots replacing human workers in that domestic setting.

Feminist and gender-subversive narratives like Pari (India, 2018), Stree (India, 2018), Debi, Bulbbul, Hawa, Lalanna’s Song (India, 2022), Qala (India, 2022), and Moshari constitute another significant thematic current within this new wave of South Asian SF cinema. This thread extends from Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s proto-feminist utopia in Sultana’s Dream—adapted into a beautifully animated short by Sandhya Visvanathan, Aniruddh Menon, Shoumik Biswas and Aditya Bharadwaj for Project Dastaan, Puffball Studios, and Spitting Image Bangalore’s Lost Migrations (2022)—to contemporary films like Shehr e Tabassum (2020) and SWIPE (2020) from Pakistan, and Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra (2025) from India.

While Indian and Bangladeshi films centre female protagonists in speculative narratives that subvert social norms in alternative realities that closely resemble the present or reflect the past, Pakistani animated films, such as Shehr e Tabassum by Puffball Studios, are preoccupied with feminist critique of South Asian patriarchal societies through depictions of surveillance and state control that affect gendered subjects. Puffball Studios’ subsequent project, the animated short film SWIPE, transposed this dystopian vision to a world and time that closely resembles our own while introducing what Mazhar calls ‘cyberkhilafat’—an aesthetic and narrative concept that explores how Islamic theology, technology, and state power can combine to dictate political and social norms that suppress individual identity. SWIPE depicts a near-future Pakistan where an app called ‘iFatwa’ doles out mob justice through swipes, following a young protagonist whose addiction to the app ultimately leads to profound personal consequences.

In the last decade, South Asian speculative cinema has evolved into a distinct, culturally inflected tradition, moving beyond genre tropes derived from Western science fiction. Today, it represents a cinematic tradition that draws upon indigenous speculative frameworks such as mythology, folklore, theology, postcolonial anxieties, and regional social concerns, while engaging with both the unknown and contemporary technological developments across the world. From Pakistani dystopian animation addressing surveillance and state repression to Indian and Bangladeshi folk horror questioning the region’s caste, class, gender, and labour politics, South Asian speculative cinema has emerged as a vital register through which the region questions its relationship to technology, power, gender, ecology, and futurity—a mirror through which we see and recognise ourselves in both horror and hope.

Drishya (he/him) is a writer and photographer based in Kolkata, India. His work spans fiction, non-fiction, criticism, cultural reportage, and documentary photography, with a focus on the histories, traditions, and living cultures of South Asia. His work has previously appeared in Homegrown, The Goya Journal, Paper Planes, Ceia Magazine, Kunzum Review, and The Polis Project, among others. He is @drishya.xyz on Instagram.