Hindi
PPC gets creepy, to invest Rs 1 billion in horror flicks
MUMBAI: Making your skin crawl, your hair rise and giving you sleepless nights. That‘s the objective of entertainment company Percept Picture Co (PPC). And at a time when Bollywood is getting cautious, PPC is getting aggressive about foraying into the horror genre.
The company has floated a new movie production arm, ‘PPC Horrotainment‘ that will focus only on producing small and mid budget horror flicks.
PPC will pump in approximately Rs 1 billion into its newly launched banner out of its internal accruals to roll out a slate of 10 movies over a period of three years.
The first project to be launched under the new arm will be ‘Grrrr….‘ directed by Priyadarshan. This will be followed by releases like Mumbai, Vehem, 13 and 888.
“We are looking at making investments in the region of Rs 800 million to Rs 1 billion to produce 10 films, to be made over three years and released over four,” says PPC COO Navin Shah.
The entertainment company plans to keep the cost of its productions in check and not get too adventurous about budgets, as has been the case with some other filmmakers recently. “The budget of the films will be stringed at around Rs 80 million,” Shah explained.
According to Shah, the invest requirements of any Bollywood horror flick is still minimal in India and hence, companies can remain optimistic of a higher return on investments while keeping the production costs tight.
When quizzed why PPC had opted for the creepy and crawly genre, Shah ventured, “When it comes to Indian consumers, the horror genre definitely carries huge potential amongst all. However, it still remains highly untapped in Bollywood. As the demand is more while the supply remains almost nil, we decided to explore this new space.”
Cinema goers had better gear up for the blood and gore.
Hindi
Remembering Gyan Sahay, the lens behind film, television and advertising
From a puppet rabbit selling poppadums to Hindi cinema, he framed it all.
MUMBAI: There are careers, and then there are canvases. Gyan Sahay, the veteran cinematographer, director, and producer who passed away on 10 March 2026 in Mumbai, had one of the latter. Over several decades in the Indian film and television industry, he turned lenses, lights, and the occasional puppet rabbit into something approaching art.
A graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, Sahay built his reputation as a director of photography across a career that stretched from the early 1970s all the way to the digital age. He was the kind of craftsman who understood that a well-composed shot is not merely a technical achievement but a quiet act of storytelling.
For most Indians of a certain age, however, Sahay will forever be the man behind the rabbit. His direction of the iconic long-running television commercial for Lijjat Papad, featuring its now-legendary puppet bunny, gave the country one of its most cheerfully persistent advertising images. It was the sort of work that sneaks into the national subconscious and takes up permanent residence.
His big-screen credits as cinematographer include Anokhi Pehchan (1972), Pagli (1974), Pas de Deux (1981), and Hum Farishte Nahin (1988). In 1999, he stepped behind a different kind of camera altogether, making his directorial debut with Sar Ankhon Par, a drama that featured Vikas Bhalla and Shruti Ulfat, with a cameo by Shah Rukh Khan for good measure.
On television, Sahay was particularly prized for his command of multi-camera production setups, a skill that made him a go-to technician for large-scale shows and reality programmes. In an industry that has never been especially patient with complexity, he was the calm hand on the rig.
In later life, Sahay turned teacher. He participated regularly in masterclasses and Digi-Talks, often hosted by organisations such as Bharatiya Chitra Sadhna, sharing hard-won wisdom on cinematography, the comedy of timing in a shot, and the sweeping changes brought by the shift from celluloid to digital. He was also said to have been involved in a project concerning a biographical film on Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy.
Tributes from the film industry poured in following the news of his passing, with colleagues remembering him as a senior cameraman who served as a rare bridge between two entirely different eras of Indian cinema. That is, perhaps, the finest thing one can say of any craftsman: he kept up, and he brought others along with him.
