Key Points

Talking about what comes to her mind thinking of “Maa”, a word that nearly every child learns to say first, Kajol told IANS: “I think you put it really well. It’s the first word that most children learn to say, to feel, and to think—before anything else. You know, the first person a child turns toward is their mother. So it starts from there and just goes deeper and deeper.”

For Kajol, Ma means goddess and her mother Tanuja as well.

“To me, both are the same. It was actually a working title for the film, but by the time we finished it, we realized that the word itself had so many layers that no other title could have more aptly defined our film than that one word.”

Bollywood has touched the spooky genre only sparingly, with notable moments scattered across decades from the cult-classic era of the Ramsay Brothers, to the breakout hit Raaz in 2002, followed by the psychological thriller Bhoot starring Ajay Devgn.

Vikram Bhatt carried the baton with a string of supernatural films, but it’s in recent years that the genre has seen a revival with genre-defying projects such as Tumbbad, Pari, and Bulbbul, Shaitaan and Maa.

Why is the industry scared to touch the genre?

Kajol said: “Absolutely. And that's exactly why we wanted to try something new like this. I think horror takes a lot of—firstly—VFX. You need a really big budget for VFX.”

Kajol mentioned that even though “Maa” is a horror film, ‘there’s a lot of emotion involved in it.”

“That’s actually the reason I agreed to do the film. I don’t think I would have felt the same way about it if it didn’t have so much emotion, such a strong emotional base. It’s not just a horror film. It’s a mythological horror film.”

She stressed that the film has the right “mix of culture, and at the same time, it has the feel of a thriller.”

“I wouldn’t have agreed to do this film if it didn’t have such an emotional core. It’s not just horror. And I think, as an industry, we’re all working toward better scripts. We’re working on tighter, stronger writing.”

She added: “We all want better scripts—and writing takes time. So it’s not that nobody wanted to touch the horror genre, it’s more that we’ve all been waiting for the right script to come along.”

The film is slated to release on June 27.

- IANS