Aditya Sarpotdar, director of Zombivli in a candid chat with mid-day.com talked about how he is willing to introduce Zombies to the regional audience.
Aditya Sarpotdar/picture courtesy: PR
Indian audience has accepted the concept of zombies, the reanimated dead bodies with an open heart. Though the notion is westernised, people have started exploring the folklore. This genre, which has been a part of cinema for a very long time is yet to be explored by the Marathi film industry. Zombivli, which is all set to hit the silver screen in April 2021, has left the audience astonished with its week-old teaser. Starring Amey Wagh, Vaidehi Parshurami and Lalit Prabhakar, the film shares the story of a town struck by none other than zombies, and how they get through.
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Horror comedies have been the current hit genre in the Bollywood industry, and it seems like regional cinema is not left behind to touch this less-explored category. Aditya Sarpotdar, director of Zombivli in a candid chat with mid-day.com talked about how he is willing to introduce Zombies to the regional audience.
Excerpts from the interview:
Zombies seem to be like a very western concept, even Bollywood has a niche set of films when it comes to this genre. What makes you feel affirmative about blood-sucking zombies in the Marathi industry?
Yes, Zombies is a western and a fictional concept, its a film driven threat that has been created purely for cinema so unlike witches, ghosts or spirits which are universally seeded in all our folk tales, zombies is very much purely a western idea. But what's happened luckily for us is, through the years there has been a great influence of different kinds of cinemas depicting zombies - may it be Korean, European, Japanese or American films. So, people have seen zombies, people know what zombies are. A huge amount of the younger audience is aware of what the Zombie concept is.
Now I do agree that it's a completely new concept for Marathi audiences for the local regional audience and the whole effort from our end has been to make the zombie a lot more relatable. When you refer someone and say that this person is possessed when you go to small towns and see these kinds of ideas that are seeded into their minds, into their culture that they come from also we've tried to relate that to what a concept of a western zombie is and bring it to a common ground, and I feel more than anything the last year has been very in a way.
We have used it to set the mindset of your audience that anything can happen now, you know any threat now is a real threat. A virus infecting people and people dying was not a threat that was considered to be very real at that scale. Now, after this whole pandemic, the zombies are becoming a new threat that is being presented through a fictional film so people are buying into that concept a little better and a little more. And also I think now people are a little more aware of what a concept of a zombie is. So, if you see the teaser, it was purely made to deliver this whole idea of what a zombie is to the audience that has never seen a zombie film and the whole attempt in our campaign is to bring the zombie a little closer to your understanding as compared to a western zombie.
Looking at the response on social media, it seems like the audience is already loving this film. Can we see more of it in the form of a series or a stand-alone franchise?
People are really giving us some really good responses. We were expecting an interesting response but this has been really overwhelming. We are very glad that the teaser has seemed to work in delivering the impact and the promise of the film. And yes, there was always a certain plan that if this film does well once it releases, we should have a spin-off so we should have a sequel to it. The only thing that we are looking forward to is purely exploring more in the genre of horror comedies because I think that is a very untapped genre. Purely if you see the kind of Hindi films that have been made now in the last 2 years or the line-up of films that have been planned this year in the Hindi market there are loads of Horror comedies that have been made. So I think in Marathi, this was a genre that was never explored. It was something that the audience was ready for but nobody went out to make a horror-comedy genre film. So if this does well it will give us the confidence to make a lot more sequels and also explore this genre a lot better and clearer.
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