audiences were aware that sex and horror were a big part of what they were going to watch. Kartik Nair, a doctoral candidate in Cinema Studies at New York University, says, “I n a way, the term is redundant since most horror films (certainly the 70s-80s Ramsay fare) were ‘horrex’ films i.e. Creature-3D (2014) , similarly, belongs to the genre of creature horror, not horrex, while Raaz: The Mystery Continues (2009) is a supernatural horror film, and Aatma (2013) belongs to the genre of psychological horror. The same holds true for its sequel, 1920: Evil Returns (2012). What truly makes a horror film horrex is the context of sex scenes: do they propel the narrative? Can the film still stand if you remove sex – or the heroine’s sex appeal – from it? By this “I’ll know it when I see it” definition, Vikram Bhatt’s 2008 film, 1920, where the heroine’s sexuality is neither underscored nor critical to the plot, and where there’s only one scene that alludes to a minor character seducing the antagonist to get her way, cannot be called a horrex film. “It’s very simple: horror and sex combined make it horrex,” says Bhushan Patel, director of Ragini MMS-2 and Alone (2015). How does one accurately define horrex? Especially since the neologism was introduced to us with mercenary motives. On Ma, Bombay Times published another piece, which carried the headline : “Sunny to take a break from ‘horrex’.” The article, much like its predecessor, began with the meaning of horrex, and concluded with the film’s release date, the only difference being this time, it got the date right.
But the efforts to sell a film based on the already bankable sub-genre had begun. Before August 11, 2013, the word had not made its way to Indian broadsheets or tabloids. That article didn’t get the film’s release date right, but it did achieve something else – labeling that sub-genre of horror films we were familiar with, but didn’t have a name for: horrex. Ragini MMS-2 didn’t release over the mentioned weekend the film came out more than five months later. The only quote in the story came from the film’s producer, Ekta Kapoor, who said straight-faced: “As Ragini MMS-2 is a hardcore Horrex (a fusion of horror and sex), it doesn’t get more auspicious than flagging off its promotion on Eid!” On August 11, 2013, Bombay Times published a small article on its front page, whose headline read : “Sunny Leone wishes Eid Mubarak from LA.” The piece informed the readers that Leone’s next film, Ragini MMS-2, was scheduled to release in two month’s time, over the Dussehra weekend. Why do horrex heroines in Bollywood rarely get to take charge when it comes to ghostbusting? What should really scare them is a creature that walks on two legs.
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