In the 1970s and ’80s – a period of churn in Hindi films, when commercial cinema was at its Amitabh Bachchan-fuelled peak and art-house movies were truly pushing the envelope – the\nRamsay brothers burst on to the scene with their horror film-making spree. They were subaltern films (of a sort), yes. Disruptive too. The industry refused to acknowledge them, and indeed hardly knew what to make of the movies, but the audience took to them with gusto.\n\nAll these decades later, the family name remains synonymous with horror movies in India – even among those who have never watched a Ramsay flick. But who were these film-makers really? Where did they come from? What impelled them? How did they pull it off? Don’t Disturb the Dead is the story of their cinema, their methods and madnesses, about horror movies as a business model, and more. It is also an open-minded and affectionate ode to the ‘disreputable’\nRamsay films, and to a family that was once a genre in itself.\n\nThrough interviews with members of the family, the people they worked with, and through archival material on their work, the book traces the legend of the Ramsay brothers – one of the\nmost fascinating families in cinema anywhere and one whose contribution to cinema deserves to be recognized.\n
About the Author
Shamya Dasgupta has been a journalist for close to two decades, and is currently senior editor with Wisden India. He is also the author of Bhiwani Junction: The Untold Story of Boxing in India (HarperCollins India) and Cricket Changed My Life: Stories of Hope and Despair from the IPL and Elsewhere (Scholastic), and has translated Mahashweta Devi’s Laayl-e Aasmaaner Aayna (Seagull Books, forthcoming).
