A first step into a genre she avoided
Mona Singh’s screen image has been built largely on emotionally intense material, which made Munjya an unlikely choice. Speaking about the film, the actor admitted that when Maddock Films called her about a horror project, she was not an easy sell. She does not watch horror films herself.
“As an actor, I really wanted to experience this because it was a completely different genre for me,” Singh said. “More often than not, I end up doing intense dramas, so I wanted to try comedy, and comedy with a dose of horror was something really exciting for me.”
The decisive turn came when the studio clarified that Munjya was a horror-comedy. Singh’s response, she recalled, was immediate: she had seen Stree and was ready to come on board. That reference explains a lot about her reversal. Her prior memory of the genre was losing sleep over Manjulika in the original Bhool Bhulaiyaa. Stree, in her account, made the style feel like fun rather than a source of nightmares.
The genre’s commercial logic
Horror-comedy has become one of Hindi cinema’s most reliable mainstream bets, and Munjya sat squarely inside that wave. Maddock Films has been building a slate of supernatural entertainments in which fear is quickly leavened by humour, which opens the genre to family audiences and to actors who might otherwise stay away from it.
- Stree reframed horror-comedy as accessible entertainment for horror-averse viewers.
- Munjya became Singh’s first project in the genre and performed well at the box office.
- Maddock Films is consolidating its identity around genre-based storytelling.
That shift matters because it is changing casting patterns. The old divide between “serious” actors and commercial fare has loosened. Horror-comedy, once dismissed as a novelty lane, has become a place where an actor known for drama can stretch into comedy while staying inside a thoroughly mainstream film. For viewers, that reframing is the story: the genre recruits both sides of a family audience, pairing a supernatural premise with jokes so no one has to sit through pure fear.
A six-performance year and what comes next
Munjya arrived inside an unusually varied stretch for Singh. She has delivered six different performances across projects this year, moving between genres and formats rather than settling into one kind of role. The pattern suggests a deliberate effort to widen her range on screen while the industry itself is mixing its genres more freely.
Singh is now shooting for filmmaker Vikas Bahl’s upcoming film. That keeps her on the same path: fewer fixed identities, more contrasting parts, and a willingness to follow a good script into territory she once avoided. For readers who track Hindi cinema as a record, the Munjya decision is worth noting not as a one-off experiment but as a sign of how the industry’s middle rank is repositioning itself.
Source: bollywoodHungama.com
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