Darna Mana Hai | |
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![]() Movie poster for Darna Mana Hai | |
Directed by | Prawaal Raman |
Written by |
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Produced by | Ram Gopal Varma |
Starring | |
Cinematography |
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Music by | Salim–Sulaiman |
Distributed by | K Sera Sera Productions |
Release date |
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Running time | 121 minutes[1] |
Country | India |
Language | Hindi |
Budget | ₹4.50 crore[2] |
Box office | ₹9 crore[2] |
Darna Mana Hai (English: Fear is Forbidden) is a 2003 Indian Hindi-language anthology horror film. The film consists of six different short stories. It stars Nana Patekar, Vivek Oberoi, Aftab Shivdasani, Shilpa Shetty, Sameera Reddy, Isha Koppikar, Saif Ali Khan, and Sohail Khan, among many others. Upon release, it met with an extremely negative response, despite the fact that it was a cult classic movie.[3][4][5][6]
Later in 2006, Ram Gopal Varma, the producer, spawned Darna Zaroori Hai, a sequel with a different ensemble cast, six new cinematographers, and seven different directors. Only Rajpal Yadav and director Prawaal Raman were back from the previous installment. Darna Mana Hai has been dubbed and released in Telugu with the same title.[7][8] It is loosely based on the 1997 film Campfire Tales.[9]
Plot
[edit]Darna Mana Hai interweaves six stories into one film. Seven friends get stuck in the middle of a forest when their car breaks down, and all of them except Vikas find refuge in an abandoned house. To keep each other amused, they tell each other horror and supernatural stories that they have heard over a bonfire.
Story 1 — On The Way
[edit]The first story revolves around a married couple, Karan and Anjali, who get stuck in the middle of a forest. During the trip, Karan is constantly trying to scare Anjali by playing pranks such as driving in the dark with light’s off. After their car suddenly stops, Karan gets out to investigate the problem. After his disappearance and his cry for help from the desolated forest, Anjali gets out and runs into the forest to rescue him. She finds Karan's torch covered in blood and is stalked by an unseen person or supernatural being. Panicking, Anjali runs around and finds a hand reaching out of a swamp. She then becomes terrified to find that the hand is wearing a watch identical to her husband's. After failed attempts to rescue him, the hand disappears. Someone creeps up on her and as Anjali screams, the person turns out to be Karan. Karan seems completely normal and fine, while Anjali, whimpering, attempts to tell him that she heard him screaming. However, Karan tells her that he heard her screams from the forest when he went to retrieve water. She looks at the torch that she found, which is suddenly clean of the blood that it was covered in. She then hurries back to the car with Karan, telling him to get them both out of there. After quickly fixing the car's problem with the water, Karan and the panicked Anjali climb into the car and drive off. After seeing Anjali's anxious and worried state, Karan puts his arm around her as she leans on him and closes her eyes. He then smirks and looks into the rearview mirror of the car, in which his reflection doesn't exist and Anjali is leaning on nothing (implying that he is a ghost, and that his hand was actually in the swamp).
After this story, one of the friends gets frightened and goes back to the car.
Story 2 — No Smoking
[edit]The second story is about a photographer, Anil, who checks into an inn while on his way to Mumbai. The manager and owner of the lodge is an eccentric man who insists that smoking is strongly prohibited in his inn. When Anil tries to go outside for a smoke, the man prevents him, telling him about the diseases that come along with smoking. The owner then locks Anil inside the lodge and tells him that in a matter of six months, he can cure his addiction to smoking. He reveals that he had cured 70% of the people from smoking, while 30% had been murdered. The owner takes Anil to a basement and shows him piles of corpses, telling him that he tried to prevent them, but these people would not quit smoking. After six months, Anil (who is now clean shaven) is now working at the lodge, having succumbed to madness. When a client walks in smoking and asks him for a room, Anil tells him that smoking is strongly prohibited. The customer displays contempt by blowing a smoke on Anil’s face and Anil calmly shoots him dead while the owner laughs at the gunshot. The story ends with Anil and the owner sitting together, enjoying the Tom and Jerry show airing on the television and watching a commercial about the effects of smoking.
After this story, a second friend in the group around the bonfire goes to the car looking for a blanket. When she leaves, the body of the first girl who left the bonfire is shown. The second girl is chased around the forest, caught and stabbed by an unseen assailant.
Story 3 — Homework
[edit]The third story is that of a school teacher named Dayashankar Pandey. He confronts a student named Pramila, who is always punished for not completing her homework. One day, when Pandey asks Pramila to hold out her hand for punishment (assuming that she did not do her homework), Pramila produces her homework instead. However, her homework elicits a strange reaction from Pandey. Following this, the incident repeats itself everyday, making Pandey increasingly anxious. Upon a suggestion from a coworker that she might be receiving help from her parents or a tutor, Pandey calls upon Pramila's mother. She denies helping her daughter. He then asks about the Om sign that Pramila draws on every page of her homework. The mother shrugs it off, which forces Pandey to drop the topic. Later, Pandey decides to go to Pramila's house. He confronts Pramila's mother and tells her that he had an intelligent friend, Varun, who died when he fell off a building while flying kite with him (In reality, he had pushed Varun off the building in jealousy) and that he thinks Pramila is a reincarnation of his friend. He says that Varun used to draw the Om sign to prove it. He realizes that he is deranging and leaves apologizing. On the way back home, he is confronted by Varun's spirit, who warns him, "You are not insane yet. But you will be." By the following morning, Pandey loses his sanity, scribbling basic mathematics on the road with cars driving.
After this story is told, another friend in the group leaves the bonfire, looking for the girls who had left them before. He reaches the car to discover Vikas killed by the knife that he had in his hand. When he attempts to go back to warn his friends, he is also confronted by the mysterious attacker.
Story 4 — Apples
[edit]The fourth story focuses on a housewife named Gayatri. She goes to market and comes across a vendor, who is selling apples for Rs. 20 while everyone else is selling apples at Rs. 60. She buys the apples from the vendor, but his demeanour unsettles her. After returning home, she throws away the apples, but they inexplicably reappear inside the fridge. Gayatri's husband Sanjay eats one of the apples and finds it very tasty while watching a cricket match on tv. She worries that something might happen to Sanjay after eating the apples, as she harbours suspicions about the vendor. The next morning, when Gayatri wakes up, she is shocked to find an apple next to her instead of her husband. She runs outside to inform the police but they became into an apple and is shocked and surprised to see apples everywhere on the ground, seemingly that every person who has eaten an apple has transformed into one. The vendor then appears with an evil look, offering Gayatri his last apple for free.
Story 5 — Ghostly Lift
[edit]In the fifth story, an elderly man named John Rodrigues is standing near a graveyard by the highway at night. A young man Amar, drives by and offers John a lift. Amar assumes that the former might be widowed and so was there to visit his wife's grave. However, John says that it is actually he who is dead. Amar dismisses it as a joke. As the conversation progresses, Amar gets exasperated with John's creepy behaviour, halts the car, and tried to evict John, who then reveals that he works for MTV Bakra (a program similar to Punk'd) in place of Cyrus, showing Amar his bag with a hidden camera and says that his crew is following them, and Amar is the first person not to get scared by the prank. John then asks Amar how he remained unnerved, to which Amar says that it was because he knew beforehand that John was not a ghost, since he himself is a ghost. John thinks that Amar is now trying to play a prank, but Amar takes off his sunglasses, revealing his creepy hollowed dark black eyes as he moves closer to John, before suddenly vanishing (implying that he’s dead). John dies in shock upon witnessing this, as the MTV crew arrive at the scene.
Back in real time, at the end of the fifth story, only two friends are left, as none of the five have returned. The two of them start talking about other things when a bespectacled youth suddenly appears, sitting at a corner. The strange man approaches the two and tells them that he has heard the five stories. He asks the boy out of the two friends to tell a story, who narrates the following.
Story 6 — Stop/Move
[edit]The sixth and final story is about a young student, Purav, who has unrequited feelings for Abhilasha, but is frustrated for being a social pariah. Purav contemplates suicide (by slitting his wrist in the washroom with a razor blade but is interrupted by his father saying that he’s late for work, drinking lots of tablets with a stinky smell in his room and falling off from a high cliff outside) but vents about not being special in front of an idol, the idol then blinks a light and Purav leaves for school. Later, he discovers that he has developed an extraordinary ability – he can immobilize a particular person just by saying "Stop!" to them and he realizes that the idol gave him power from the blink. Purav uses his ability to freeze Abhilasha, and later demonstrates it to her by immobilizing a number of students in their college. Abhilasha, frightened of Purav’s power, agrees to date him. Thereafter at Night, Purav returns home dancing victoriously, Using the power to his Father to the way to his room (without telling him but his father knows that Purav is gone insane), and thinks about megalomaniac fantasies. In his delusion, Purav accidentally immobilizes himself while looking at the mirror by saying “stop”, trying to test himself in the mirror. His father and his mother finds him like that in his room, with a victorious smile frozen on his face, he shakes him but he does not reply. Purav is immediately rushed to the hospital, but in vain. On the way to the hospital, Abhilasha sees this on her home window.
Story 7 — The Ending
[edit]The strange man tells the two friends that it is now his turn to tell a story. He tells them a story that they are partly familiar with.
A group of seven friends are travelling one night when their car breaks down. They seek shelter under a ruined shack and start telling stories to each other to kill time. After each story, one friend in the group (supposedly frightened) goes out into the forest and gets killed, one by one, until only two are left. The two friends that are left stop telling stories to each other and the killer, who is now bored, comes out to them. The killer appears to be the very same strange man that is narrating this story. Labelling himself a genius, he says that he cannot stand fear as it blocks progress, and he would kill anyone who is scared, hence the murders.
The man then fatally stabs the boy. Shruti tries to escape but the killer catches up and stabs her, though she manages to bludgeon him to death soon after.
When day breaks, Shruti awakens and walks up to the main road to find the place swarming with policemen and her friends' corpses being taken into ambulances and sees the killer sitting on a car. She tries to tell the police that he is the murderer, but the policemen don't notice. The killer then points at a body, which she shockingly discovers to be her own. She realizes that she too is now a ghost, as the killer then tells her there is nothing left to fear as everyone is dead, including himself. They are joined by the ghosts of her friends as the movie ends.
Cast
[edit]- Nana Patekar as John Rodriguez
- Saif Ali Khan as Anil Manchandani
- Vivek Oberoi as Amar Vashisht
- Sanjay Kapoor as Sanjay Joshi, Gayatri's husband
- Sohail Khan as Karan Ahuja
- Shilpa Shetty as Gayatri Pandit
- Isha Koppikar as Abhilasha Malhotra
- Aftab Shivdasani as Purav Khandelwal
- Boman Irani as a hotel owner
- Sameera Reddy as Shruti Kapoor
- Gaurav Kapoor as Romi Yadav
- Antara Mali as Anjali Deshmukh, Karan's wife
- Raghuvir Yadav as Dayashankar Pandey (teacher)
- Anuj Pandit Sharma as Varun Goswami
- Revathi as Pramila's mother
- Rajpal Yadav as an apple vendor
- Sushant Singh as a serial killer
- Malavika as Neha Bhatia
- Rahul Singh as Dev Bohra
- Peeya Rai Chowdhary as Mehnaz
- Kiku Sharda as Amar Varma, friend of Shruti
- Yusuf Hussain as Mr. Khandelwal: Purav’s father
Box office and reception
[edit]The film was a flop at the box office. Even though the film was a commercial failure at the box office it was praised for Prawaal Raman's direction and the performance of the cast was also praised.
Soundtrack
[edit]Darna Mana Hai: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack | ||||
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Soundtrack album by | ||||
Released | 13 June 2003 | |||
Genre | Feature film soundtrack | |||
Length | min | |||
Label | ZEE Records | |||
Producer | Salim–Sulaiman | |||
Salim–Sulaiman chronology | ||||
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The soundtrack features 6 songs composed by Salim–Sulaiman, with lyrics by Lalit Marathe.[10]
Track listing:
- "Darna Mana Hai" (4:20) – Sunidhi Chauhan, Ninad Kamat, Naresh Kamat
- "Darna Mana Hai Remix" (4:15) – Sunidhi Chauhan, Ninad Kamat, Naresh Kamat
- "Homework" (5:11) – Clinton Cerejo, Aparna Jha, Vijay
- "Jo Dar Gaya Voh Mar Gaya" (4:45) – Sunidhi Chauhan, Salim Merchant, Naresh Kamat
- "No Smoking" (4:56) – Ravi Khote
- "Stop" (4:27) – Sonu Nigam, Sunidhi Chauhan
References
[edit]- ^ "Darna Mana Hai". British Board of Film Classification.
- ^ a b "Darna Mana Hai – Movie". Box Office India. Archived from the original on 27 October 2022. Retrieved 27 October 2022.
- ^ "Darna Mana Hai - movie review by Narbir Gosal - Planet Bollywood". Archived from the original on 29 April 2022. Retrieved 29 April 2022.
- ^ "Darna Mana Hai Review 1.5/5 | Darna Mana Hai Movie Review | Darna Mana Hai 2003 Public Review | Film Review". Bollywood Hungama. Archived from the original on 29 April 2022. Retrieved 29 April 2022.
- ^ "Movie review: 'Darna Mana Hai' starring Nana Patekar, Vivek Oberoi, Saif Ali Khan". Archived from the original on 29 April 2022. Retrieved 29 April 2022.
- ^ "Don't get scared, get thrilled". Archived from the original on 29 April 2022. Retrieved 29 April 2022.
- ^ "Darna Mana Hai Telugu Full Movie HD | Ram Gopal Varma | Mango Videos - YouTube". www.youtube.com. Archived from the original on 28 August 2021. Retrieved 28 August 2021.
- ^ "Darna Mana Hai Telugu Dubbed Movie | RGV | Shemaroo Telugu - YouTube". www.youtube.com. Archived from the original on 28 August 2021. Retrieved 28 August 2021.
- ^ "EDITORIALS Indian Horror Anthology 'Darna Mana Hai' Offers Mix of Fun and Eerie Stories [Horrors Elsewhere]". Bloody Disgusting. Retrieved 22 April 2022.
Campfire Tales is not exactly renowned, but its core concept is as timeless as it is adaptable. In the late-'90s anthology, four young people distract themselves with scary stories after a car accident. The same basic setup is indeed used for Darna Mana Hai, although everything else is completely different. So, Raman's anthology is a remake in only the loosest sense.
- ^ "Planet-Bollywood - Music Review - Darna Mana Hai". Archived from the original on 7 April 2023. Retrieved 29 April 2022.
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