‘Chaar Diwari’ interview: Syed Shadan on the horrors of renting in Mumbai and why Hindi cinema keeps chasing formulas

The Mumbai-based filmmaker unpacks the real-life anxieties behind his unusual new horror short, reflecting on urban loneliness, shrinking apartments and the future of Indian horror

Published - August 06, 2026 06:48 pm IST

Writer-director Syed Shadan and a still from his horror short ‘Chaar Diwari’ | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

For a country that keeps producing entirely new reasons to lose sleep, Indian horror has remained frustratingly committed to recycling old ones. Haunted havelis, cursed villages, ancestral sins, forgotten folklore — the genre seems to have exhausted every original idea that doesn’t involve turning to the past as an inexhaustible source of terror. But upcoming filmmaker Syed Shadan’s Chaar Diwari points the camera somewhere considerably more contemporary. Premiered at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival as the festival’s only Indian selection and winning the Bronze Audience Award and Best Asian Short, the independently produced psychological horror film builds off an experience familiar to almost every young Mumbaikar: a broker saying, ‘ek perfect flat hai.‘

Set in Mumbai, the film follows a tenant whose suspiciously affordable apartment begins shrinking around him, turning one of the city’s most relatable nightmares into a very literal manifestation of its suffocating housing crisis. The approach reflects how Shadan understands horror itself. He sees it as an elastic form capable of carrying deeply personal stories. “If you want to talk about whatever it is that needs a certain kind of processing, it needs to be very engaging and something very primal,” he says.

A still from ‘Chaar Diwari’ | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

The 27-year-old writer-director credits the past decade of international horror, particularly the wave associated with studios like A24, with broadening his own understanding of what the genre could accommodate. “The ideas of loneliness, especially urban loneliness, was something that I wanted to talk about,” he says. “Horror is uniquely placed to do both: have the freedom to speak about so many things while being able to also tell a very entertaining story.”

Shadan describes Chaar Diwari as “semi autobiographical”, recalling how he and two friends spent months searching for a larger apartment after finding themselves crammed into a 400-square-foot flat. “Between the three of us... we started hating each other after a point because there was no escaping each other in such a tiny flat.”

Finding another home involved navigating Mumbai’s familiar hierarchy of compromises. There was the budget and there were landlords reluctant to rent to people working in the film industry. “And then again,” he says, “the added ‘bonus’ of me being a Muslim fully reduces your options to just a handful.” When they finally secured what appeared to be the perfect apartment, complete with air conditioning in every room and comfortably within budget, they overlooked the obvious question. “We weren’t wise enough to think, ‘Why such a good house?’”. They soon found out.

Every evening during the monsoon, termites emerged from inside the apartment. “This was the first time we ever got to know that termites could fly,” he chuckles. But the problem quickly became all-consuming. “You’re not working on your spec script... you’re not meeting the right kind of people. All you’re trying to do is find a house for yourself. And that is everything that you’re doing with all the energy that you have.”

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The image that eventually anchored Chaar Diwari surfaced only after he had moved elsewhere. Living alone, he realised several days had passed without speaking to another person or even leaving the apartment. “That’s when the thought of, ‘What if the house was getting smaller every day?’ came to me,” he recalls.

The shrinking apartment naturally invites comparisons to the growing fascination with liminal spaces and internet-born spatial horror à la Kane Parson’s breakout A24 hit, Backrooms, though Shadan is quick to distinguish Chaar Diwari from that lineage. He readily admits to being “a big fan” of the aesthetic, but argues that it grows out of a distinctly Western relationship with architecture. “They have such big infrastructure for not a lot of people,” he says. “As Indians, I think that is such a counterintuitive thing to see because we have so little for so many.” Instead, he found himself thinking about Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a film he readily classifies as horror. “Just the fact that you understand where this house is, and what is happening around it is horrifying,” he says. “What is happening inside of the house... doesn’t matter as much.”