Scream Stream: The making of Aake had a few bizarre occurrences, says its director Chaitanya KM

The film was shot at locations listed among the 10 most haunted in the world.

Sharmiela Mandre and Chiranjeevi Sarja in Aake

When filmmaker KM Chaitanya was offered the opportunity to remake the Tamil film Maya in Kannada, he was given a free rein to change things around according to how he thought was best suited. For starters, instead of setting the story in one city and differentiating the two tracks – one in colour and one in black and white – as was in the original, Chaitanya chose to set one in London and one in India. And it was the London portions that occasionally scared the heebie-jeebies out of the cast and crew.

"I was to go to the UK 10 days before the shoot, but then my visa application was rejected. The producers eventually managed to get me a visa on an express scheme and I reached with only five days to go, in which time I had to finalise locations, get the requisite permissions and some local cast members as well. One of our principal locations, Horsley Towers, was apparently listed among the 10 most haunted places in the Europe. The spirit of a famous English poet's daughter, who died of a drug overdose, apparently haunts it. Yet, since the former castle had been converted into a resort, we decided to stay there and shoot, because we were there during the English summer, when it doesn’t get dark till 7-8 pm, and we needed to do a lot of night shoots. A few days into the shooting schedule Indian members of the team began to have strange experiences there. The corridors of Horsley Towers are really spooky; you literally feel that someone is standing behind you when you walk by. I remember Balaji Manohar saying that he thought he saw what looked like the apparition of a woman. Creepier still was that in UK, where power cuts are almost unheard of, every morning at 3 am, the lights on set would go off and even the generator would not kick in immediately," says Chaitanya, adding that his script had some eerie similarities to his location. "There is a line in the film about the lights going out and that is exactly what kept happening to us. Also, we used Horsley Towers as a mental asylum, and, as it turns out, back in the day it did function as an asylum that went defunct owing to mismanagement, which was also the thread in the narrative of Aake," says Chaitanya, adding that the most bizarre, though, was that one of the producers of the film was seriously ill around the time of the film’s release and passed away a while later.

The late Chiranjeevi Sarja played an artiste commissioned to paint images of a ghost haunting a decommissioned mental asylum, while Sharmiela Mandre was an actress and single mother in the film. How their stories merge formed the crux of the narrative. Back in the day, Chiranjeevi had said that although he had done horror films earlier, Aake was different and was not a regular horror film.

Where to watch: Aake can be streamed on SunNXT or on Youtube.

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