New Book Presentation by Kartik Nair, Ph.D.: Seeing Things Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror

In conversation with Priya Joshi, Ph.D. (Professor of English)  and Meheli Sen, Ph.D. (Associate Professor of South Asian and Global Cinemas, Rutgers University–New Brunswick School of Arts and Sciences).

Kartik Nair, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Temple University. His first book, Seeing Things, is about low-budget horror films made in 1980s Bombay, and is out with University of California Press in February 2024. Nair is one of the core editors of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. His writing has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film Quarterly, Discourse, Quarterly Review of Film & Video, Los Angeles Review of Books, and India Today. 

Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror (University of California Press, 2024)

In 1980s India, the Ramsay Brothers and other filmmakers produced a wave of horror movies about soul-sucking witches, knife-wielding psychopaths, and dark-caped vampires. Seeing Things is about the sudden cuts, botched makeup effects, continuity errors, and celluloid damage found in these movies. Kartik Nair reads such "failures" as clues to the conditions in which the films were made, censored, and seen, offering a view from below of the world's largest film culture. By combining close analysis with extensive archival research and original interviews, Seeing Things reveals the spectral materialities informing the genre's haunted houses, grotesque bodies, and graphic violence.

Reception to follow in Mazur 310. Contact chat@temple.edu with questions.