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In an in-depth conversation with Khauf's writer Smita Singh and director Pankaj Kumar, we delve into the psychological layers of the series and explore what it signifies for the future of horror storytelling.
Horror as a genre has been quietly reinventing itself, blending supernatural elements with fantasy and mythology to mirror the real-world horrors we often struggle to name. Recent examples like Sinners, which explores Black history through the lens of vampirism, are making waves globally. Even in India, films like Tumbbad paved the way for this kind of storytelling much earlier. And why shouldn't filmmakers lean into horror? In times when speaking openly feels increasingly dangerous, the supernatural offers a powerful, subversive language to express the inexpressible. Though this isn't necessarily a new idea — psychological horror has long been a vessel for hidden fears, whether in literature or cinema. In a world where women are taught to live with fear from a young age, what better way to tell that story than through horror?
That’s where a show like Khauf becomes so significant. It channels feminist horror, something that captures the intangible anxieties that become part of womanhood: control, objectification, violence, the omnipresent gaze, and societal expectations. It breathes life into these invisible traumas, making the unseen terror that women endure palpable, leaving the larger world to wrestle with its own guilty conscience. As we see these young women encounter malevolent forces eerily mirror the emotional aftermath of abuse. Their hyper-vigilance, feelings of dissociation, and the erosion of trust both in others and themselves feel heartbreakingly familiar. Set against a backdrop of everyday misogyny, rape culture, and victim blaming, Khauf compels us to rethink our ideas about justice and victimhood, making it more than just a horror story but a raw and necessary reckoning.
Also Read: Ground Zero review: A powerful Kashmir story that brings humanity to a valley too often defined by bloodshed!
To truly understand how this haunting and atmospheric feminist horror series came to life, we sat down for a detailed conversation with the show's writer, Smita Singh and director Pankaj Kumar, who Singh reunites with after Raat Akeli Hai. The show also marks a significant milestone for Pankaj, as it is his directorial debut. However, he is no stranger to creating powerful visual worlds, as seen in films like Tumbbad, Guns and Gulaabs, Farzi, Brahmastra, and many more. To his credit, this time, he steps into a new role, crafting a story that avoids cheap scares and jump-scares, instead offering a slow, thoughtful meditation on fear itself, particularly the fear woven into the everyday experience of being a woman in a patriarchal world. Our conversation also touched upon some of the theories and questions circulating online, especially around the show's ending and how a slow-burn show reveals the psychology behind it that lingers in your mind, unfolding its layers long after the show is over.
Here is how the conversation went!
Your story brings such a deeply lived-in, everyday horror to women’s lives that it feels like the horror genre itself gets redefined. Here, ghosts aren’t nearly as terrifying as real life. But would you say this is more of a revenge fantasy thriller wrapped in a horror tale? Where did the idea of combining these elements first come from?
Smita: You know, horror is often treated like an adventure-park thrill in mass cinema - it’s about jump scares, a rollercoaster of fear. But if you dive deeper into literature, or look at works like Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, you realise that horror at its core is about something much more profound. It’s about facing the things we can’t easily talk about - shame, humiliation, deep psychological wounds. Horror provides us with a language to explore those hidden spaces within ourselves.
For me, Khauf taps into that more literary tradition of horror, rather than what most people have come to expect from popular, mainstream horror today. And I think or at least I hope that as audiences evolve, so will their understanding of what horror can be. As for whether it’s a revenge thriller, personally, I don’t see it that way. But I can absolutely understand why someone might. There are definitely elements of revenge in the story. At its heart, though, I would call it a psychological suspense thriller cloaked in horror.
The fact that most people struggle to talk about their lives but you draw this from your own experiences, how did that happen?
Smita: I lived in Delhi and while I was at FTII, I started thinking about how to explore that. I wanted to tell stories about women, about the many women I had seen living there, about everything I had witnessed firsthand. Initially, I tried doing it through drama - it was an exercise where you had to write a hundred episodes - and I thought, okay, this is easy because I know these lives, I know these women, I know the rhythms and dramas of their everyday experiences. But when I looked at it more closely, I realised something crucial was missing: fear. Fear was a constant companion in those lives, something always present beneath the surface. Drama alone didn’t quite capture that. And that’s when I realized - the only way to talk about those experiences truly was through the genre of horror. Horror gave me the language to bring that invisible, everyday fear into the open.
While the screenplay already had this underlying sense of fear, Pankaj, I’d love for you to chime in - how did you create the visual grammar where Khauf comes alive and this eerie male gaze seems to follow women everywhere?
Pankaj: Well, a lot of it was already embedded in the scripted setup. When you’re working within the horror genre, certain visual approaches come naturally - it demands a specific kind of atmosphere, certain textures. But we wanted to go beyond the usual genre tropes. We really wanted to bring out the fear that real people experience. Think about what narrow corridors and alleys do even in real life - they make you feel trapped, claustrophobic. So, right from the production design stage, we ensured that the spaces themselves felt suffocating. We wanted our characters to appear as though they were physically trapped in their environments, because thematically, that’s exactly what’s happening - the girls are trapped, just as the doctor traps his victims within his own world.
Visually, it was about emphasising that sense of confinement. When we designed the haveli (the mansion), we kept all this in mind. Even the open verandas were made to feel like cages, enclosed with iron bars. The staircases, whether they led up or down, were designed to either ascend into darkness or descend into hell. So yes, the screenplay definitely gave us the inspiration for the kind of spaces we wanted to build, the lenses we wanted to use, and the way the camera navigates through those spaces. It was all about visually encoding that underlying fear into every frame.
That’s the striking part - the fear comes alive not from manufactured supernatural elements but from the everyday spaces themselves. The open yet isolated lanes, the dingy subways, the festering walls of the hostel, even the Roohani Dawakhana in Old Delhi - they all build the horror organically. Given that you utilised so many real locations, how did you navigate these spaces to shape the lensing? And was Nosferatu or Tumbbad ever discussed as a reference point?
Pankaj (laughing): No, no, we never discussed either Tumbbad or Nosferatu! This screenplay - this show - has its own language. And honestly, I believe every film or series should find its own language. This story demanded spaces that felt fearful on their own. When the screenplay itself is screaming out the fear that women feel - even in open spaces, in public transport, while simply walking down a road - then it becomes the filmmaker’s duty to manifest that fear visually. Every lens choice and every shot selection we made was with the sole purpose of immersing the viewer in the scene, making them feel exactly what the characters are feeling. And what the characters feel is being trapped, fearful, and constantly circumspect about their surroundings. Even in broad daylight, they’re surrounded by darkness-by leering eyes, by bodies that constantly invade their personal space. That emotional thread guided all our visual decisions not just to show fear but to make the audience experience it firsthand.
Smita, there’s so much happening in the series, but two larger thematic dissections stand out. One is about the older, more experienced girls, who are haunted and warn the younger ones, like Madhu, to stay away, almost as if saying this is what growing up in Delhi means. The other is the psychological versus fantasy-supernatural battle: internal traumas being dealt with alongside the external fear, with a psychiatrist trying to heal while an old-school doctor embodies terror. Would you agree with these readings, and how did you develop this layered structure?
Smita: Yes, absolutely. The story exists on two levels. When I’m writing, it’s essential for me that there’s a strong thematic underpinning. Otherwise, I’m not entirely sure why I’m telling the story. And while I don’t always want to be heavy-handed, this time I did want to make a very deliberate commentary not just on Delhi but on urban centres at large where women are constantly negotiating public spaces. If Raat Akeli Hai was about what happens inside four walls, Khauf is almost a natural sequel in my head, it’s about what happens when you step outside into the city.
Coming to Madhu and the older girls, yes, that dynamic was crucial. What happens to women who’ve already lived through the experience? How have they hardened? Some have left, some have perished, some have simply endured. A lot of this came from personal experience, my sister was the first in our family to move to Delhi, while the rest of us were still in Bhopal. She couldn’t crack it; the aggression and toxicity of the city overwhelmed her. I remember how hard it was for her to come back and admit, “I couldn’t deal with it.” When I went to Delhi later, it weighed heavily on me that I couldn’t turn back. One of us had already returned defeated, I had to survive. That sense of wounded sisterhood, the older women in the hostel warning the young ones, that’s deeply personal.
And again, for me, the genre has to do more. If horror remains just about chills and thrills, it doesn’t really work. Since I was trying to create a definitive commentary on the city, I couldn’t ignore its toxicity- the clash of old and new. Even in Pankaj’s design, you can see that mix- the ancient and the modern, because that’s Delhi. The ancient toxicity of patriarchy gets its last dying gasp through the old doctor, while the young girl struggles to survive against it. As for the psychological and mystical elements, I don’t see them as separate. When someone sees a snake instead of a rope, it could be psychological trauma manifesting. But to that person, it’s real horror. For me, these experiences all stem from the same source- deep-rooted fear, isolation, survival, and so, they blend seamlessly.
Would you say the psychological and mystical angle you explore is an allegory for how the world gaslights women into doubting the truths they can clearly see?
Smita: Absolutely. If I hadn’t called it Khauf (horror), I might have called it Gaslight - if the name hadn’t already been taken! (laughs)
Pankaj: (laughing) That’s true. Gaslighting was something we frequently discussed while working on the screenplay.
Were there any inspirations for the show, both from a visual and writing perspective?
Smita: From the writing side, I wouldn’t say I consciously pulled from anything specific. I do admire Polanski, but I didn’t go back and study his works for this. However, Rosemary’s Baby has always lingered with me. I keep returning to it, especially when I think of the psychological elements like the paranoia, the sense that you can’t trust those around you. The girls in the show, when they’re poisoning her, remind me of that atmosphere. There’s that constant question of who’s trustworthy, whether you’re the unreliable one or the people around you are. Is it like a coven of witches? I think there’s a little bit of that, a dark humour in it.
Pankaj: Yeah, I’d say the visual side was similar. We didn’t consciously reference any particular film or show. Over the years, everything you’ve seen as a filmmaker stays with you in the back of your mind. Those influences may come through subconsciously, but for this show, it needed its own visual language. I don’t like pulling direct references when I work; I prefer to let the film evolve its own style as we go along.
I asked this because there is a specific sequence, when Madhu fights Jeeva in the dal-dal, it reminded me of a scene in The Worst Person in the World, where the protagonist has this nightmarish dream sequence about the gaze she’s felt all over her body. Was that something you were thinking of while creating this sequence?
Smita: That sequence in the dal-dal was actually inspired by the concept of venom, of toxicity. We wanted to create a feeling that there’s something constantly around you, something that consumes you. It’s like this black sludge, this venomous presence that takes over, that hollows you out. In the scene, when she’s struggling in the sludge, it’s meant to represent being completely stuck, overwhelmed by something you can’t escape. Everywhere she looks, it’s the same. It’s all-consuming. The idea behind it was captured brilliantly.
Pankaj: I don’t recall the "The Worst Person in the World" scene, but yes, the blackness in our sequence represents the toxicity she’s forced to endure. She drowns in it, and when she thinks she’s free, the ghost tries to gaslight her. That’s the essence of that moment in the sludge. It’s her battle with something suffocating, something that seems to trap her at every turn.
It’s fascinating how both the writing and visuals come together to create such a powerful atmosphere. And strangely, a French film and an Indian show found a connection. I guess that’s art! But during my research, I came across some intriguing theories. I’d love to get clarity on a few of them. One theory is about why Madhu needs Jeeva’s help in the final episodes. Is it because part of Jeeva is still alive within her? Also, is Nakul imagining Madhu, or is she real? And why do both Jeeva and Hakim target Madhu—is it because she’s seen as weak?
Smita: That’s a lot to unpack! So, first things first: Jeeva isn’t really helping Madhu. Jeeva is actually aggravated and angry. There’s no “rule” in the show like some supernatural law that says Jeeva is there to protect her. Instead, Jeeva is an angry spirit that has taken over Madhu. We see this progression, like in the third episode, when there’s a shift, it’s like a portal opens for the spirit to latch on to her. In the fourth episode, he’s behind her in the mirror, and by the fifth episode, he’s completely inside her. When someone tries to harm the vessel that he inhabits, he reacts, but he’s not trying to kill anyone. If you look at Madhu in the fifth episode, she’s focused on one thing: getting back to the hostel. Anyone who stands in her way gets destroyed not out of vengeance but because she’s lost control. She doesn’t even remember her actions. When she’s at the pub, she’s confused, trying to scrub off the blood, asking herself what’s happening. It’s Jeeva acting through her, but Madhu doesn’t consciously know what’s going on. As for why Madhu is seen as weak, she’s carrying deep trauma. The more Jeeva takes over, the more her trauma weighs her down, and the more the entity (Jeeva) grows stronger.
Now, Hakim is a different story. He’s after young women, almost like a serial killer. He believes in human sacrifice, using women for his own twisted rituals. There’s a deeper allegory here, as you pointed out. He’s been teaching his disciple to continue his work, control these women, and manipulate them. His obsession with power, as evidenced by the phrase “kaabu,” reveals his desire to control. Regarding Nakul, no, Madhu doesn’t kill him. His downfall is more about the world closing in on him. He’s haunted by the spectre of Madhu and what he’s done, which leads to his death. There’s no direct confrontation with her. It’s more about the emotional and psychological toll he’s experiencing. The camera pulls up, the windows are open, there’s no crash, he’s trapped in his own guilt.
As for Madhu’s final look, she’s been touched by evil. It’s not just a look of triumph but one of survival, of having endured something far darker. It signifies that she has been touched by evil. It’s not just her gaze; it’s what she conveys with it. At that moment, she received the message that Nakul is dead. We don’t know whether it’s the same moment or the next morning, but in that instant, she understands his fate. As the camera pulls up, she speaks her truth: “With your mask and your friends, you were powerful, hiding behind your facade, surrounded by your men. You could do all this to me, but now you’re gone, and I’m still here. I’ve survived, and I will continue to exist, while you no longer do.” Her words and her look reflect a profound shift, she’s been shaped by trauma, touched by evil, and the innocence she once had is gone. This erasure of her former self, a loss of naivety, is something akin to what happens with severe PTSD. In that moment, she meets the world not with vulnerability but with a hardened strength. Something new has taken the place of her innocence, a resilience born from what she has endured.
It feels like many of the explanations and revelations happen in the later episodes, like what happened on the New Years and even the visual of the rape is unveiled towards the end. Do you think this bottom-heavy structure is contributing to the theories and misunderstandings?
Smita and Pankaj: Actually, the core of the story is revealed much earlier, in the second episode. It’s all there in what Madhu sees and experiences, it’s about where she’s taken, emotionally and psychologically. We’ve never left anything to the end. The second episode already sets the tone by showing how everything unfolded. It ends without directly showing what happens after she’s dragged away, because there’s no need to spell it out visually. It’s about how she perceives herself in that moment. It’s about her rage, her struggle, and how that memory resurfaces when she’s pushed to the extreme. This isn’t a late revelation; it’s all part of her perspective and experience. What you see in those later episodes is her memory, and it’s her journey of being gaslit into believing the things she sees. So, it’s not a delayed reveal, it’s a deeper understanding of her inner world.
Placing it earlier would have been too literal, and we felt that would have been bad writing and bad filmmaking. The struggle, the entire challenge, was to create a new cinematic language. It’s about making the audience connect with the protagonist’s emotions, not spoon-feeding them every detail. We didn’t want to dump the exposition right away. We trust the audience to figure things out. It’s like reading a good book, sometimes the best books don’t give you all the answers upfront. And to be honest, I think some of this confusion comes from not enough people engaging with the material the way they would with a complex novel. With a good book, the exposition doesn’t happen in the first few pages, but through layers of detail and discovery as you go along.
Smita: Pankaj’s ability to interpret the story this way is what makes it so rich. The reason I believe Pankaj’s interpretation of the material is so unique is that where the page or the script ends, his imagination takes over. His vision isn’t just shaped by what he’s seen in cinema; his own imagination deeply enriches it. The way he reads and absorbs the material isn’t limited to past experiences—it’s a creative process that draws from what he envisions, bringing a layer of depth and originality that goes beyond the written word. And that’s why the visuals feel so different. It’s not just about making the scenes look beautiful; it’s about how Pankaj works with the actors, how he lets them take up space, how natural the performances feel. It’s about giving the scene room to breathe, allowing it to sing on its own. Direction is so much more than just making things look striking, it’s about crafting a moment, making sure the actors are fully immersed in their roles, and letting the story unfold organically.
Was it challenging to pitch this project, particularly given the sensitive subject matter and its unique approach to storytelling? And do you think the success of projects like Stree helped in any way?
Smita: Oh, absolutely, that’s a whole story in itself. I must give credit to the Amazon team, they immediately picked up on the story. However, getting it from concept to screen was a long and arduous journey. When you take a different approach, you need to bring a lot of people along with you. It’s about finding the right balance, you can’t hold onto your vision so tightly that nobody else can contribute, but you also can’t let go too much and allow it to become too chaotic. It’s a constant balance between control and collaboration. There were some challenges along the way, but the results speak for themselves.
Pankaj: Not at all. Stree and Khauf are in entirely different genres . Stree being a horror comedy and this being a serious horror and I never expected the audience from Stree to appreciate Kahuf. People who enjoy horror with a humorous twist may not necessarily be drawn to a pure horror narrative like this one. It’s easier to digest something lighter, with humour laced in - it softens the experience. But intense horror doesn’t let you off the hook. It forces you to stay in that world and think deeply about what’s happening. It’s more challenging to create, but ultimately, it’s also the more rewarding experience for both the audience and the creators.
So, how do we create more stories like this in the future, especially when there seems to be an appetite for more serious, hard-hitting horror?
Smita: I think dark, realistic horror has fewer takers because it’s all about the treatment. What Pankaj said is right, the intensity and treatment make a big difference. Horror has always had its fans, but it needed a bit of reinvention, which films like Stree and Bhool Bhulaiyaa have achieved. Those films are more palatable for commercial ventures because they’re accessible to a broader audience - they don’t push people into a space where they’re overly uncomfortable. However, with platforms that engage audiences on a deeper level, there is room for stories that offer more than just entertainment. Hopefully, this will allow for more intense horror to flourish. Horror series are challenging to pull off because you can’t just rely on chills, thrills, and spooks for hours on end. You need more than that, it requires a different skill to make it work over a longer format. So, while the demand for serious horror is growing, it must be handled with great care and creativity.
Khauf is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
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