The teaser for director Prasanth Varma's Zombie Reddy which just dropped on YouTube has a mix of horror and thriller elements, but what's fascinating is that it's being marketed as the first Telugu zombie film. It's true, but Ram Gopal Varma's 1996 film Deyyam was partly a zombie thriller.
Two-and-a-half decades ago, many movie-buffs in India didn't have an idea about the zombie genre. If dead people didn't stay in their graves and came back in flesh-and-blood to haunt people, it was considered a horror film. In a sense, that's what happens in Deyyam, too. But it was much more than a regular offering with jump scares and movie gimmicks.
Zombie Reddy, on the other hand, follows the template set by American films, where all the dead people run together in a large group and blindly target the living. Moreover, this thriller seems to be set around the current pandemic, COVID-19.
While a few feature films have been written, shot, edited and released since March, they have not taken the fears and fatalities surrounding the coronavirus into account.
Director Prasanth Varma's earlier films Awe and Kalki took inspiration from the Hindu mythological universe in naming the principal characters and designing their behavioural patterns. Even in Zombie Reddy, he seems to be doing that, for there are some scenes associated with gods and goddesses. It will mostly be a classic case of the good versus evil.
The movie, starring Teja Sajja, Daksha Nagarkar and Anandhi in the lead, will release next year. Until then, there are going to be many more bites, aka teasers.