Shahrukh Khan Ghost Movie! I SHOULD be writing my Little Things reviews, but I don’t wanna. I already did stuff today, subbed as a teacher for the church youth group (do teens just not talk? Courtney, how do you make them talk? It’s so BORING), and took my car in for an oil change, and all kinds of useful things. I don’t wanna do more stuff! I wanna do fun brainless stuff! Like write Ghost Movies for SRK!!!!

Option 1: SRK is Ghost Hunter Who Falls For Ghost

Shahrukh is such a lovely feminist figure, and so many horror movies revolve around supernatural female vengeance for injustice. I feel like there has to be a way to make these two things work together interestingly.

I wanna make this a real character study thing with SRK at the center. We are introduced to him as a for real ghost hunter in a realistic scary version of the real world. We can even open with a flashback. His loving father was killed by a ghost in front of his eyes, and a tough ghost hunter rescued him and adopted and raised him. Let’s say the ghost hunter is Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, just because I like him. And then when SRK is a young man (played by a different actor), Mohammed is killed saving his life and tossing him his magical ghost killing knife and SRK uses the knife to kill the ghost that killed him. It’s a whole thing, we also see a talkie bit explaining the legend of the ghost knife. It was first forged back in colonial times and given to a colonial officer whose family had been killed by a ghost. He went on the hunt for the ghost and finally killed it, then spent his life hunting other ghosts with his loyal servant/friend. He was killed by a ghost and his servant took up the knife, and his name. The servant adopted an orphan, and so on and so forth. For the generations, the legend of the ghost hunter who never died lived on. And now SRK is the current version, and knows it is time to start finding someone to carry on the legend. There’s a young cop who helped him with his last ghost hunt and follows him around (let’s say Rajkummar) and SRK reluctantly starts mentoring him.

But! And this is what makes it cool (I think)! On the latest ghost hunt, Rajkummar makes a mistake and it ends with Shahrukh trapped in a vision along with the ghost (let’s say Dips). He experiences her life, and death, and afterlife. She was sold by her father into sex work, abused by her clients, and finally killed because she had just had too much and said “no”. While dying, she had a vision of Kali who gave her the offer to be reborn and life a better life, or stay on earth and protect others from falling into what she suffered. She chose to stay and be a protector, and the mysterious deaths that happened in the village were all deaths of people who abused others, from an abusive husband to a mother-in-law to a young man who liked beating up sex workers. Shahrukh is finally rescued from the vision, but he can’t forget what he learned.

And then the rest of the film is Shahrukh coming to understand that all the ghosts he has “killed” were protecting their communities, not harming them. Including the ghost who killed his own father, his loving father was cruel to the sex workers he paid. Shahrukh even comes to understand that the man who first had the ghost-killing knife made was trying to avenge his father and brothers, who were terrible men and killed by the ghosts of the women they killed. It’s a whole cycle of patriarchal violence and unfairness. Shahrukh confronts Rajkummar and Rajkummar turns into the enemy, the one who refuses to question and change. Meanwhile, a young girl of the village Sanya Malhotra, understands what Shahrukh is saying. In the end, Shahrukh allies with Ghost Deepika who (because of their bond) he can always see and hear and even feel, and with village girl Sanya, and they defeat Rajkummar. The three of them (Shahrukh, Ghost Deepika, and Sanya) then leave with a new mission of PROTECTING avenging ghosts of India.

Option 2: Shahrukh is a Ghost Who Seduces and Kills Women

There’s an Indian horror trope of the “Sexy Ghost”. She possesses women and makes them seduce men or whatever. Let’s gender flip that!!!!

Shahrukh is an evil entity trapped in an old mansion. A film crew (always a film crew) comes to document the mysterious occurrences. Shahrukh greets them as the caretaker, a retired scholar who enjoys living out in the country. He slowly romances every woman on the crew, the older producer, the young camerawoman, the aggressive on air reporter woman. At the same time, the men on the crew are mysteriously dying. In a terrifying final reveal, we learn that Shahrukh is the angry evil entity, he seduces and then possesses the women, uses them to kill the men, and then discards them when he is done. All three women are found by the side of the road, with minds completely wiped blank of everything, as innocent as newborn children. BUT! The footage remains!!!!

A tough female ghost hunter sees the footage and understands that the ghost will not harm women, instead he seduces them. Her colleagues tell her she is crazy to go into the mansion, but she says she has a secret weapon. She goes into the mansion alone and Shahrukh does his usual seduction routine and she seems to fall prey to it. Only at the last minute, as he is about to Sex/Possess her, she reveals that she has created a trap for him and lured him into it, a magic circle surrounding her bed. He is stunned and angry, at which point she reveals her secret weapon…she’s a Lesbian. No man has ever attracted her, Shahrukh’s powers are powerless over her. He will never take over the mind and body of a woman again!

Option 3: Shahrukh in a Haunted House

Classic, right? But let’s do it “Haunting of Hill House” style where it is as much about the dysfunction of the people being haunted as the ghost itself. Shahrukh is an NRI with an NRI family. His older brother, who was supposed to hold on to the family home and traditions, died in a terrible accident along with his whole family. Shahrukh, in guilt and grief, wants to come back to India and move to the falling down village home and turn it into a hotel, just like his older brother planned. His American wife absolutely refuses to come or allow his youngest child to come with him. His two older children are allowed to choose, his teenage daughter has recently been pressured and almost raped by her secret boyfriend and asks to come with as a way to get away from her trauma. And his college student son asks to come because he wants to avoid the pressure from his college boyfriend to finally come out to his family.

The kids start interacting with ghosts, the daughter makes friends with a young woman who slowly reveals her own sexual trauma and they help heal each other. The son meets a young man who is in love with a girl from another community and they bond over the struggle between love and disappointing your family. Meanwhile, Shahrukh is being terrorized by ghosts, figures who keep trying to stab him, push him, trick him. He tries to send his kids away for their own safety but they refuse to leave. He is keeping the truth of what is happening from the kids and his wife because he doesn’t want to scare them. In the end, the two “friend” ghosts try to kill the kids, because they say that it is better to die and be at peace than try to live. Shahrukh tries to stop this and also realizes it is what happened to his brother. And he finally reveals to his kids that it wasn’t an accident, his brother drove the family car off the cliff in a murder/suicide. His brother has lost his job and was in debt and about to lose the family home. His wife wanted to leave him, his daughter wanted to move in with her boyfriend, his son was a drug addict, so he decided to kill them all and keep them “safe”. His brother is the evil entity who has been trying to kill Shahrukh and thereby “save” him as well. Once Shahrukh and the kids are finally honest with each other and pool their information, they are able to escape the house. The final shot shows the hundreds of ghosts who live there together in the house, having been convinced to kill themselves because Death is easier than Life. And then happy ending, Shahrukh and the kids return to America, choosing to live in their present instead of their past.

Okay, which do you like best????