While that's highly debatable, it sure holds true as far as fiction and film-making go. The medium relies on darkness and drama, among many other aspects of human psychology, to execute some edge-of-the-seat thrills on big screen. Hindi films do it too with rampant relish and exaggeration.
And so, 'I'll drink your blood,' declares a delirious Priyanka Chopra in Vishal Bhardwaj's soon-to-release 7 Khoon Maaf wherein she's believed to murder all of her seven husbands.
Quite a tall order, that. Prior to this wickedness, Bollywood's list of manslaughter features quite a few brutal examples of the same.
Browse through this random collection and vote for the most memorable on-screen khoons.
It's not every day you expect the film's leading man to toss the heroine off the terrace ledge with statements like, 'Main tumhe azaad karta hoon.'
And that's what makes this bewildering exchange between Shah Rukh Khan and Shilpa Shetty most special.
Creepy voices and whoosh sounds behind trees lead to a squirming Helen even as an unspecified someone throws a lasso thrown around her neck.
Cut to next scene wherein she's discovered cruelly hung onto a tree. Brrr.
It's a straight lift from The Bone Collector but, nonetheless, terrifying.
Having faced hell and beyond courtesy Saif Ali Khan's swindling ways, Urmila Matondkar's avenging angel ties her unconscious offender to a chair.
He wakes up to find himself in a cave with a crowd of hungry rodents for company. Death by torture, anyone?
What a horror of a honeymoon!
Instead of singing melodious songs in Swiss fields, the just-married Raj Kiran finds himself unceremoniously bumped off by his gold-digger wifey who demonstrates some killer moves running him over and over again till he's dead enough to be reborn as Rishi Kapoor.
Smitten by Aishwarya Rai's striking beauty, Akshay Kumar plays a shady cop-turned-new leaf, who often harps how 'Yeh neeli aankhen marwayengi.'
Quite prophetic! As it turns out Rai's a mole and the 'Et tu, brutus' realisation results in a tragic loss of his life after she guns him down with glee.
Sometimes you don't need to see what's happening to sense the enormity of the situation.
In what is possibly one of the most ingenious scenes in the history of Hindi movies, the screen fades to black while Jimmy Shergill's brash blue blood is slain at the hands of Amitabh Bachchan in and as Eklavya: The Royal Guard.
The angry young man continues to regale us with his signature rage.
Amitabh Bachchan plays a wronged guy who is falsely accused of murdering his wife by the ones who are actually responsible for the same.
Once he's out of jail, AB goes on a revenge spree resulting in full-on carnage -- the cop, the doctor and finally the politician in elaborately staged executions.
Long before Danny Denzongpa played Rajnikanth's nemesis in Robot, the duo worked on 1983's super hit, Andhaa Kanoon.
In true Rajni style, the bad guy meets with a not-so-nice end. And so Danny's fate is sealed in a cold-blooded murder within the comforts of his spacious bathtub.
Inspired by The Eyes of Laura Mars, the suspense drama stars Madhuri Dixit as a clairvoyant types who has a premonition about her elder sister's demise.
Although it's revealed only towards the end, there's enough anxiety ridden moments before a bullet is stung in Moon Moon Sen's tummy and her body is concealed behind a broken wall. Hair-raising stuff!
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