Rajan Ramgopal Verma has moved through acting, ad filmmaking and Gujarati cinema. With Jhaad Phoonk, he arrives at Hindi cinema through a subject he says he has been carrying since childhood. The OTT feature, shot entirely in Uttarakhand, is built around the folk ritual of jhaad-phoonk — the attempt to chase away illness or misfortune — which Verma grew up seeing in Aligarh.
A director’s own memory becomes the premise
Verma told Hindustan Times that the practice is visible across UP, Uttarakhand, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal. He also recalls being taken to someone as a child to ward off evil, and says that memory became the root of the film. His interest, he says, is belief itself: the gap between trusting a doctor and trusting a ritual.
That framing is the film’s real subject. Verma does not simply place a spirit on screen; he uses the supernatural to examine why people choose ritual over medicine, and how faith and blind faith coexist. He points to everyday examples — changing paths when a cat crosses the road, or attempting to shake illness off a neem tree — as behaviour that is widely recognised but rarely centre-stage in Hindi horror.
“Horror as a subject is the hero of the film if it is well made and gives the right message,” he said. To explain why a supernatural figure sits inside a story about superstition, he points to the Ramayana’s pairing of Ram and Ravana: the conflict carries the moral.
What the film brings to Hindi horror
Horror has a dependable audience in Hindi, and Verma enters with an ensemble of known faces.
- Cast: Yashpal Sharma, Padmini Kolhapure, Sumbul Touqeer Khan, Harsh Rajput and Apratim Singh.
- Geography: Shot in Uttarakhand, including an isolated bungalow deep inside a Dehradun forest.
- Track record: Four Gujarati films, with one more on the floors and Ghanghoor complete.
The setting was a practical choice. Verma says the weather and the bungalow gave the eerie, isolated backdrop the script needed. A larger Uttar Pradesh-set project is next, and Aligarh will be part of it.
From ad films to a multilingual career
Verma began in ad filmmaking and acting, with roles including Ajmal Kasab in Ashok Chakra (2015), Zindagi 50:50 (2013) and My Friend Ganesha. When he wrote a script with Bunty Rathod and a producer wanted it in Gujarati, he was initially reluctant. The result, Jessu Joordaar (2021), became a blockbuster, and he has since become comfortable in Gujarati; Ghanghoor is also complete.
That path explains the Hindi debut. Jhaad Phoonk is not a conventional ghost story but an attempt to build fear around a shared folk memory — the kind of story that travels because the ritual itself is already familiar to a large part of the country.
Source: Hindustan Times
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