How zombies got up and shuffling in Bollywood

Mainstream Hindi cinema hasn’t had a lot of zombies ambling about, but they have been first movers in India. Check out some of the earliest undead works.

Mainstream Hindi cinema hasn’t had a lot of zombies ambling about so far, but they have been first movers in India.

In 2013, Devaki Singh and Luke Kenny’s Rise of the Zombie pipped Raj & DK’s more popular Go Goa Gone by a month to become India’s first zombie film. It’s the tale of a nature photographer who finds himself changing into something not-quite-human after his girlfriend leaves him.

Dibakar Banerjee’s short in the anthology Ghost Stories (2020) follows an education officer as he moves into a remote rural district and discovers that zombies have infected everyone except a little boy and girl.

Go Goa Gone used humour, and a boys’-road-trip theme, to draw significantly larger numbers at the box office. It’s the story of three friends who wake up after a rave to find that the other party-goers have turned into zombies. It was co-produced by Saif Ali Khan, who also played a bleached-blond Russian zombie-slayer named Boris.

On a more serious note, Dibakar Banerjee’s dark and gripping untitled short in the anthology Ghost Stories (2020) follows an education officer as he moves into a remote rural district and discovers that zombies have infected everyone except a little boy and girl. This story offers thinly veiled allegories for religious fundamentalism, government neglect and government overreach.