In one of his walks with his father, Manu Radhakrishnan, visiting his father’s hometown of Kadakkal in Kerala as a schoolboy in the 90s, had come across a compound with no house in it. The folklore was that the place had ‘sancharam’ – a coinage in Malayalam that means that there were spirits or divine creatures lurking about. But Manu’s father brushed aside those stories and gave him the rational explanation – it was a marshy land, unfit for building houses. This was three decades ago. Grown up and a parent himself now, Manu adopted a new method of storytelling for his children, retelling the folk tale along with the scientific explanation. A method he would adopt in the first film he made, a horror fantasy called Gu, where children form the main characters.

“Saiju Kurup’s character in the film is inspired by my father,” Manu says with a touch of fondness. Among the children, Deva Nanda, known for her role in Malikappuram, plays the lead. Saiju and Deva play father and daughter in both the movies. But Gu has no connection with the other, it is an out-and-out children’s film with elements of fantasy and horror. “I would call it a psycho-emotional drama with elements of fantasy and horror,” Manu specifies. 

He had thought of the story idea much before, but the decision to make it his directorial debut came after a conversation with Manianpilla Raju, popular actor and producer. The two of them had watched Malikappuram together and Raju asked Manu if he had a subject where the girl actor could play the lead. “This was the time the horror thriller Romancham had come out and was running successfully. He asked me why the film worked and that led to us planning a horror movie together,” Manu says.

Manu told him the story idea in a single line -- it dealt with ‘daytime horror’. Raju was immediately psyched, Manu says, and came on board as producer and actor. Raju’s son Niranj, another rising actor, also wanted to join when he heard the story. Niranj’s character Mitran, that of a young uncle who tells scary stories and gets as frightened as the kids, was written into the script and must have brought the most laughs in the theatre. “It was not added for the sake of humour or to lighten the horror elements, the script just evolved in that manner. The original script was a little more dark,” Manu explains.

Gu, Sanskrit for darkness, is also short for Gulikan, a mythical character that the film is centred on. Mitran explains to the children that Gulikan is a sort of temporary Kalan (Malayalam for Yama or God of Death), created at a time when Kalan was on a break. The children buy the tales and begin to have ‘sightings’. Deva Nanda plays the girl who comes from afar with her parents to visit the ancestral home of her father to attend a ritual there. Children settled away coming home to Kerala for vacations is a relatable storyline for generations of Malayalis who grew up away from their parents’ hometown, with fond memories of visiting their grandparents. Manu says he decided to stay away from the cliche of a grandparent telling stories to the children and put Mitran, the young uncle, in that place. For his narrator, he chose a young boy who lives in the ancestral home and has the knowledge of the insider, while his cousins visit.

In Manu’s treatment of Gulikan stories and haunted characters, there is always a parallel interpretation for the rational viewer. “That is how I tell them to my children, giving them both sides of the story,” he says. He commends all the actors for their performance, including the grown-ups, saying that a small slip from any of them would have cost the film badly. But most of all, Manu says, he is humbled by the trust that Manianpilla Raju placed in him, a debutant.

Gu released on May 17 and is currently running in theatres.