There had been plenty of Indian horror films before Ram Gopal Varma’s Raat (many of them the work of the extended Ramsay family) but Varma’s film was the first to try for a modicum of mainstream respectability. It was a successful ploy as it enjoyed unusually good critically acclaim and although it didn’t click with audiences as it should have, it’s picked up a respectable cult following in the years since, belatedly helping to usher in a new wave of horror films made on the subcontinent.

The Sharma family – father (Akash Khurana), mother (Rohini Hattangadi), teenager Manisha (Revathi), affectionally known as Minnie, and Minnie’s young nephew Bunty (Master Ateet) – move into a house reputed to be haunted. One day, Bunty finds a cat roaming around the house and adopts it, but it’s accidentally killed when Mr Sharma backs over it with his car. The cat is buried in the back garden but turns up again, alive and apparently none the worse for wear, a few days later. On a picnic with her boyfriend Deepak (Chinna, using the pseudonym Kushant), Minnie is possessed by a force that emerges from the surrounding woods and she murders her best friend Rashmi (Jaya Mathur). Her terrified parents seek help, from their creepy old neighbour (Nirmalamma) who seems to know more about the house and what’s happening to Minnie that she’s letting on, from a psychiatrist (Ananth Nag) and eventually from Sharji (Om Puri), an exorcist. Eventually he finds that the house is being haunted the malevolent ghost of a former owner (Sunanda) and he prepares to make a final stand against the evil in the network of tunnels beneath the house.

Like a lot of Indian films, Raat is too long for its own good and the number of false scares in the first half threatens to becoming annoying but overall it’s not hard to see why the film was become so popular. From the attention grabbing opening steadicam shot around a small village, it’s an energetic film that plays like a compendium of 70s and 80s horror greatest hits, pilfering ideas and images from The Exorcist (1973), The Evil Dead (1981), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Pet Sematary (1989) (the undead cat features heavily throughout) among others. But one of the simple joys to be had from the whole “remakespolitation” scene, the noble art of remaking Hollywood hits around the world, is seeing familiar stories and tropes being reworked through the lenses of other cultures.

But Raat is no slavish remake – Varma adds enough new wrinkles to well worn ideas to keep you constantly on your toes. In one particularly impressive scene, a cinema empties in an instant, its braying audience (they appear to be watching the single funniest film ever made) vanishing and leaving Minnie seemingly alone and terrified. There are other oddities along the way – pop-culture obsessed Rashmi invites Minnie into her bedroom (to listen to Michael Jackson’s Bad CD – or a cover version of it at least) with the words “enter the dragon” for reasons that are impossible to fathom. Raat also has that charmingly odd habit you often hear in Indian films of characters suddenly and unexpectedly dropping whole English phrases into the dialogue.

It still has a slightly raggedy edge to it that only adds to its already plentiful attractions (listen out for the noisiest door hinges you’ll ever hear) and there are perhaps a few too many unwanted diversions with Minnie and her boyfriend Deepak, but once she becomes possessed at around the halfway mark it starts to get really interesting. It’s never particularly gory or frightening – though a surreal visit to Sharji’s disfigured guru in search of the spiritual weapons needed to take on the evil spirit is weirdly creepy, and a neck-snapping is horribly convincing (the victims head is turned all the way round of course, a la Reagan’s victims in The Exorcist. And there’s a fantastic climax set in the tunnels beneath an old house, tempered by some disappointingly crude effects, but enlivened by a great turn by Sunanda as the physical embodiment of the spirit causing all the problems.

The whole cast is excellent in fact. Film and theatre veterans Rohini Hattangadi and Akash Khurana as do a lot of the emotional heavy lifting as Minnie’s increasingly frazzled parents and although he only turns up very late in the day the great Om Puri is fantastic in Max Von Sydow’s The Exorcist role, an intense and commanding performance that adds some gravitas to the wild finale. But the real kudos belong to Revathi who is exceptionally good as the trouble Minnie, her unsettling stillness being particularly effective. It’s a role that could have been played at full throttle but she dials it all the way back to chilling effect.

The growing popularity of Raat eventually led to a whole string of Indian horror films that scored bigger at the box office than any of their predecessor. Varma himself went on to make several more horror films, among them Bhoot (2003), Darna Mana Hai (2003), Agyaat (2009) and Bhoot Returns (2012). Few of the films that followed in the wake of Raat were able to emulate its box office success and it wasn’t until Vikram Bhatt’s Raaz (2002) before the genre got its next big hit. But Raat opened the door, showed that well-crafted horror films had their place among the hundreds of films released each year in India and paved the way for the boom in genre films that followed a decade after its initial success.