Veerana: Vengeance of the Vampire Blu-ray Review

Mondo Macabro

Blu-ray Release: September 9, 2025 (standalone edition, Ramsay House of Horrors collection released January 31, 2023)

Video: 1.33:1/1080p/Color

Audio: Hindi DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono

Subtitles: English 

Run Time: 140:20

Directors: Shyam & Tulsi Ramsay

A local landowner's daughter (Jasmin) is possessed by the spirit of a dead witch and becomes a bloodsucking seductress. On the next moonless night, she will be used in a hideous ritual to raise the evil witch from her tomb. (From Mondo Macabro’s official synopsis)

The Hindi cinema scene, colloquially known as Bollywood, is typically remembered for light-hearted romantic musicals, historical melodramas (which are also often musicals), and thinly-disguised remakes of Hollywood hits. In truth, the region is among history’s most prolific movie machines and its output encompasses more or less every genre under the sun.

In the 1970s, horror had its Bollywood moment, in large part thanks to brothers Shyam & Tulsi Ramsay. Beginning with Tulsi’s second film, Two Yards Under the Ground (Indian: Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche, 1972) and following into their second film as a duo, Andhera (aka: Darkness, 1975), the Ramsay Bros. went all in on horror, fostering a monopoly that lasted for two decades. Their first big hit was 1984’s Purana Mandir (released on English language video as The Haunted Temple), leading them to more ambitious productions, like Saamri (1985), which was shot in 3D, Tahkhana (aka: Tahkhana: The Dungeon, 1986), which put a perhaps Raiders of the Lost Ark-inspired action/adventure spin on the formula, and their wildly popular version of Dracula, Bandh Darwaza (aka: Under the Ground, 1990).

Their 16th film, Veerana, aka: Veerana: Vengeance of the Vampire (1988), took inspiration from a surprising source – José Ramón Larraz’ dreamy erotic thriller Vampyres (1974). It’s not a bad choice, as Vampyres is truly one of the best films of the ‘70s lesbian vampire boom, just a very unexpected one, given its relative obscurity and India’s strict censorship rules at the time. In the end, this was a vibes-based inspiration and Veerana is more interested in paying direct homage to The Exorcist (1973). Visually, the Ramsays’ special brand of smoke-blanketed, color gel emblazoned maximalism bears the Gothic hallmarks of Hammer horror, Roger Corman’s Poe movies, and Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (Italian: I tre volti della paura, 1963). They also stole footage from John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), specifically panicking dogs, but none of that film’s plot. 

This outlandish imagery is boosted by garish costume and set design that emphasizes the modern Indian setting and creates a surrealistic confluence of Eastern and Western flavors. This acknowledgement of culture and place, often in spite of attempts to ape Hollywood and European filmmakers, is often what makes Asian horror of this era so unique, especially when it’s coming from countries that were establishing new horror traditions, like Indonesia and India. Additionally, those of us that love these films expect budget constraints, so production value is measured by creativity, ingenuity, and a culture representation, not dollars on screen. The worst offenders are bad because they look lazy, not cheap, and Ramsay movies are never lazy.

Back to my original point about genre eclecticism – Bollywood movies were sort of expected to be everything in one package, hence their epic lengths. For the price of a single movie, you could see a comedy, a romance, an action movie, and a horror film, all in one, and hear the latest pop hits during a series of musical interludes. Obviously, very few filmmakers work well across the genre spectrum and some tonal combinations cannot be organically melded. Like most of its contemporaries, Veerana is a mixed bag that can’t quite sustain its lovable weirdo energy for an entire 140 minutes.

The action sequences can’t match Veerana’s Hong Kong and Indonesian counterparts (the liberal use of slow motion and crash zooms certainly helps) and I wish the gore wasn’t left to our imaginations, but the only element that rarely works at all is the broad comedy. This isn’t a specific problem with the Ramsays or Indian cinema, though. My dislike of dopey mugging extends to Italian movies, British movies, Hollywood movies, and so on. Some gags are respectfully silly, even if they don’t inspire genuine laughs, such as a secondary character, Hitcock, who is obsessed with movies and constantly cracks metatextual jokes about film theory and the filmmaking process.

Bibliography:

• The Beast From Bollywood: A History of the Indian Horror Film by Pete Tombs, published in Fear Without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across the Globe, edited by Steven Jay Schneider (FAB Press, 2003)

Video

Not surprisingly, Veerana wasn’t ever officially released on US VHS. It first hit North American home video via Mondo Macabro in 2009 as a double-feature DVD with the Ramsays’ next movie, Purani Haveli (1989). Mondo then released the first HD version in 2023 as part of their six-film Ramsay House of Horrors: Bollywood Horror Collection. This is the same disc, minus the other films and boxset booklet. Note that the boxset press release lists all the new transfers as being 2K restorations of camera negatives, but this solo release’s packaging refers to Veerana as being 4K restoration of the camera negatives. 

Whatever the source (and the opening title card does warn us of condition), the 1.33:1, 1080p transfer is a very good recreation of what I expect Veerana looked like on its initial run. The most notable artifact is the muddy yellow grain that appears over some sequences, but I think I’d personally appreciate that Mondo kept the transfer a bit dirty, instead of trying to digitally grade the discoloration away. Generally, the palette feels natural and exactly as loud as the Ramsays intended it to be. Grain and other textures are on the soft side, but not unusually so for a lower budget film of this age (especially one with this much smoke on set) and this is preferable to a mess of oversharpened haloes. 

Audio

Veerana is presented in its original Hindi language and uncompressed DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono. I don’t know as much about the production of Bollywood films as I do Italian, Spanish, and Hong Kong movies, but I believe they also depended on ADR to maintain consistency. The spoken dialogue is, as a result, very consistent and clear. The music is a little more hit & miss, sometimes changing from a muffled to a clean tone within a single sequence. This could be a condition issue, a case of the original tracks being weirdly mixed, or a combination of both.

The music is credited to Bappi Lahiri and Anil Arun, though I’m not sure if that means all of the music or just the songs. Either way, Lahiri is perhaps the most prolific songwriter in Indian cinematic history (he works on both Hindi and Bengali films), not to mention as a pop music performer (Guinness has him holding the record for the most songs written in a single year, 1986). Most people are going to remember the songs, but the score features some real bangers, such as the awesome title theme. 

Extras

• Introduction with Tim Paxton (6:24, HD) – The author of The Cinematic Art of Fantastic India (CreateSpace Independent, 2018) briefly discusses Bollywood censorship, a supposedly crappy remake, and lead actress Jasmin’s disappearance from public life.

• Trailer

The images on this page are taken from the BDs and sized for the page. Larger versions can be viewed by clicking the images. Note that there will be some JPG compression.