Shyam Ramsay, one of the seven Ramsay Brothers known for cult horror films such as Veerana, Puraani Haveli and Tahkhaana, died of pneumonia in a hospital in Mumbai on Wednesday, his family said. He was 67.
He is survived by daughters Sasha and Namrata.
The origins of the horror empire set up by the band of brothers can be traced to a modest radio shop in Karachi in undivided India. The shop’s proprietor, Fatehchand U Ramsinghani, had relocated to Mumbai after the Partition and decided to get into the business of film production. It was Ramsinghani who adopted the last name Ramsay and went on to make films such as ‘Shaheed-E-Azam Bhagat Singh’ (1954) and ‘Rustom Sohrab’ (1963), which featured screen icons Prithviraj Kapoor and Suraiya. The films worked on the box office and Ramsinghani pulled all seven of his sons – Kumar, Tulsi, Shyam, Keshu, Kiran, Ganguly and Arjun – into filmmaking. But they suffered losses when ‘Ek Nanhi Munni Si Ladki’ (1970), starring Kapoor and Shatrughan Sinha bombed.
According to Amborish Roychoudhury’s book, ‘In A Cult of Their Own: Bollywood Beyond Box Office’, Tulsi and Shyam watched the film in a theatre with the audience and realised the people reacted most strongly to a particular scene. In the scene, Kapoor’s character, wearing a mask and a grotesque costume, enters a museum to steal something. The duo then convinced their father to start making horror films.
{{/usCountry}}According to Amborish Roychoudhury’s book, ‘In A Cult of Their Own: Bollywood Beyond Box Office’, Tulsi and Shyam watched the film in a theatre with the audience and realised the people reacted most strongly to a particular scene. In the scene, Kapoor’s character, wearing a mask and a grotesque costume, enters a museum to steal something. The duo then convinced their father to start making horror films.
{{/usCountry}}Ramsay Brothers became synonymous with the genre and went on to make a string of B-grade films in the 1970s and 1980s, featuring zombies, vampires, werewolves, reanimated corpses and snowmen. Shyam Ramsay, who was considered the brain behind the group, directed most of the films. He also made the country’s first horror series, The Zee Horror Show, which went on to become a hit. He also did some episodes for ‘Saturday Suspense’, ‘X Zone’ and ‘Nagin’. Shyam Ramsay returned to the big screen in 2000, when he started the production on “Dhund: The Fog”, which released three years later.