Cultural Monsters in Indian Cinema:

The Politics of Adaptation, Transformation and Disfigurement

Abstract

In India, a popular trope is adapting cultural myths and religious iconographies into visceral
images of the monster in literary and visual representations. Cinematic representations of
the Indian monster are modelled on existing folklore narratives and religious tales where the
idea of the monster emerges from cultural imagination and superstitions of the land. Since it
rationalizes several underlying archetypes in which gods are worshipped in their monstrous
identities and disposition, the trope of the monster is used in cinema to indicate the
transformation from an ordinary human figure to a monstrous human Other. This paper
examines cinematic adaptations of monster figures in Malayalam cinema, the South Indian
film industry of Kerala. The cultural practice of religious rituals that worship monstrous
gods is part of the collective imagination of the land of Kerala through which films represent
fearsome images of transformed humans. This article argues that cultural monsters are
human subjects that take inspiration from mythical monster stories to perform in a terrifying
way. Their monstrous disposition is a persona that is both a powerful revelation of repressed
desires and a manifestation of the resistance against certain cultural fears associated with
them. The analysis of several Malayalam films, such as .DOL\DWWDP (1997)
Manichithrathazhu (1993) and Ananthabhadram (2005), reveals how film performance
adapts mythological narrative elements to create new cultural intertexts of human monsters
that are psychotically nuanced and cinematically excessive.