‘Chaar Diwari’ interview: Syed Shadan on the horrors of renting in Mumbai and why Hindi cinema keeps chasing formulas

For a country that keeps producing entirely new reasons to lose sleep, Indian horror has remained frustratingly committed to recycling old ones. Haunted havelis, cursed villages, ancestral sins, forgotten folklore — the genre seems to have exhausted every original idea that doesn’t involve turning to the past as an inexhaustible source of terror. But upcoming filmmaker Syed Shadan’s Chaar Diwari points the camera somewhere considerably more contemporary. Premiered at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival as the festival’s only Indian selection and winning the Bronze Audience Award and Best Asian Short, the independently produced psychological horror film builds off an experience familiar to almost every young Mumbaikar: a broker saying, ‘ ek perfect flat hai. ‘