It all appeared to start when a group of students were enjoying an evening picnic and a game of spin the bottle, but one girl was reluctant to smooch with the portly gent she was supposed to, and after pretending she was up for it she ran away into the nearby forest, with him protesting and pursuing. She hid from him behind a tree, and as he went by towards the country house deep in the woods, she started back - but what was that awful noise? It sounded like a bloodcurdling scream and the girl began to panic... with good reason.
Raaz, which means Secret in English, was something of an oddity in 2002 for Bollywood, a fair-budgeted horror movie that didn't simply make a minor amount of ripples on the public's consciousness, but actually went on to be the second biggest hit out of India in its year. Nobody predicted that, but there might have been a good reason for its catching the imagination of audiences, and that was because as with quite a few movies out of this nation's industry it was inspired by other, Hollywood successes, the most blatant one being Robert Zemeckis' high profile chiller cum murder mystery What Lies Beneath.
That said, you would never guess that from the opening ten minutes, where that hapless student winds up possessed and strapped to a hospital bed for her trouble, with local professor Agni Swaroop (Ashutosh Rana) drafted in to explain what was going on in histrionic fashion as he yells about an evil spirit that needs to be laid to rest or there will be further mayhem. Evidently nobody took him at his word, for soon a couple whose marriage is in trouble, Aditya (Dino Morea) and Sanjana (Bipasha Basu) have returned to this Ooty region where they first met in the hopes that it will rekindle their passion. Not a bad idea, except that there is a snag, and that snag is the evil sprit.
Yes, before long Sanjana is hearing that scream - director Vikram Bhatt, in the first of his horror trilogy, claimed that he heard a similar scream when making the movie on location and couldn't explain it (!) - and other odd happenings are making her wonder if she's losing her marbles. Having seen this type of thing before we know that there really is a supernatural force at work, but just what does it want from her? You'll have a long wait to find that one out, as there was a lot of padding to bring this up to two and a half hours, and the Zemeckis effort was not exactly brisk, but after a while you might be wondering when events are going to come to a head. Rest assured, that finale was worth waiting for, though you did feel every minute of the lead up.
To prevent this from getting too derivative of one film, Bhatt's screenwriters opted to make this derivative of other films as well, most notably Fatal Attraction; in the Zemeckis work it was murder that was the main bone of contention, here it was adultery. Like the Michael Douglas freaks out eighties epic, the blame for the misdemeanour was placed squarely on the doorstep of the other woman, and even if he does end up hovering between life and death the impression was that Aditya got off pretty lightly when it was his missus who had to tackle a rampaging possessed zombie for the hysterical resolution. To be fair, it was a more entertaining ending in its barmy way than either What Lies Beneath or Fatal Attraction mustered up, but couldn't help but seem less like a plea for forgiveness and more like a reactionary, or at least fairly conservative, warning about men straying too far from the marital bed.
