(En)Gendered Malevolence: The Uncanny Poetics of the Keralite Ecogothic in Malayalam Horror Cinema

Malayalam horror cinema frequently uses distant, rural locales as sites for supernatural narratives, creating a distinctly gothic mode of storytelling. Films like Aakasha Ganga (1999), Anandabhadram (2005) and Kumari (2022) interweave myth, folklore and witchcraft with Kerala’s natural environment, crafting an ecogothic aesthetic where the landscape exudes a menacing, uncanny presence. This article examines the emergence of a distinct Keralite ecogothic aesthetic in Malayalam horror cinema, which fuses gothic, folkloric and ecohorror conventions to produce a regional cinematic mode of discourse, often depicting forests, sacred groves, caves and ancestral tharavads as spaces haunted by vengeful spirits and forgotten gods. The study demonstrates how the films often critique and yet simultaneously reproduce dominant sociocultural structures that reinforce ecophobic and casteist imaginaries that associate nature, marginalised indigenous communities and rural societies with malevolence and abjection, alienating them from contemporary cultural consciousness. Through an analysis of gender, caste and ecophobia, the article examines how these films participate in imaginative ecologies that transform natural spaces into sites of dread, revealing deep eco-cultural tensions and reinforcing hegemonic distinctions between human communities and the natural world. While films like Kumari (2022) subversively engage with patriarchal and societal oppression, they continue to rely on problematic negative mythologisations of the environment. The article thus positions Malayalam horror as a significant regional archive through which Kerala’s sociocultural and environmental anxieties are aesthetically mediated and negotiated in relation to broader South Asian gothic and ecohorror discourses.