Presented by Meheli Sen

The most iconic image in the global horror hit, Ringu (1998) is arguably that of a dead and sodden Sadako (Rie Inoo) climbing out of the grainy footage on a television set to kill the film’s male protagonist—a climactic sequence that echoes her equally terrifying emergence from the well earlier in the film. This paper considers the water-well as a figure across Asian horror as an overdetermined site of violence against women and the transgenerational transmission of historical traumas. Burdened with the symbolic weight of the vagina and womb, the well, I suggest, nonetheless functions as an index of both individual and collective tragedies. In Indian horror films, the well inevitably invokes the historical catastrophe of the Partition, when hundreds of women either willingly committed mass suicides by throwing themselves into wells in rural areas or were brutally assisted in the act by kin and community. Indeed, beyond the railway train, the well is probably the most potent affective image of the violence that women endured in the period that birthed the modern states of India and Pakistan. In this context, therefore, the well is never simply a metaphor for the fecund/abject female body, although it is always that too. Reading recent Indian horror films like Kaali Kuhi (2020), Chhori (2021), and Neelavelicham (2023) against earlier texts like Ringu provides a generative framework for understanding the ways in which genre films continue to situate women and girls within a continuum of violence and precarity in non-western cinemas.

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