# Darna Mana Hai

Darna Mana Hai (English: Fear is Forbidden) is a 2003 Indian Hindi-language anthology horror film. The film consists of six different short stories. It stars Nana Patekar, Vivek Oberoi, Aftab Shivdasani, Shilpa Shetty, Sameera Reddy, Isha Koppikar, Saif Ali Khan, and Sohail Khan, among many others. Upon release, it met with an extremely negative response. Despite the fact, it became a cult classic movie. Like previous Ram Gopal Varma film Bhoot, it did not feature the songs composed for it.
Later in 2006, Ram Gopal Varma, the producer, spawned Darna Zaroori Hai, a sequel with a different ensemble cast, six new cinematographers, and seven different directors. Only Rajpal Yadav and director Prawaal Raman were back from the previous installment. Darna Mana Hai has been dubbed and released in Telugu with the same title. It is loosely based on the 1997 film Campfire Tales.

## Plot

Darna Mana Hai interweaves six stories into one film. The film opens up with seven friends Shruti (Sameera Reddy), Suman , Romi (Gaurav Kapoor), Mehnaaz (Peeya Rai Chowdhary), Neha (Malavika), Amar (Kiku Sharda), and Vikas going on a road trip to Goa. While taking a shortcut on a forest road their car gets a flat tire. Unable to fix it, the group decides to seek help after spotting a lighted house off in the distance. Vikas, who has been antagonized by everyone except for Shruti, decides to stay back in the car. The rest reach the house to see that it's in ruins but there are signs that show someone lives there. While waiting they set up a bonfire and to keep each other amused, they start to tell horror and supernatural stories.

### Story 1 — On The Way

The first story revolves around a married couple, Karan (Sohail Khan) and Anjali (Antara Mali), who are on a road trip on a forest road. During the trip, Karan is constantly trying to scare Anjali by playing pranks such as driving in the dark with lights off. After their car suddenly stops, Karan gets out to investigate the problem. He disappears and his cry for help from the desolated forest makes Anjali run to rescue him. She guesses that it's yet another prank until she finds Karan's flashlight covered in blood and feels she's being stalked by an unseen person or supernatural being. Panicking, Anjali runs around and finds a hand reaching out of a swamp. The hand is wearing a watch identical to her husband's and she frantically tries to rescue him. After he sinks, someone creeps up on Anjali as she screams. The person turns out to be Karan. Karan seems completely normal and fine, while Anjali, whimpering, attempts to tell him that she heard him screaming. However, Karan tells her that he heard her screams from the forest when he went to retrieve water. He's holding the flashlight which is clean and Anjali starts to think maybe she's hallucinating. She tells Karan to get them both quickly out of there. After fixing the car's problem with the water, they drive off. After seeing Anjali's anxious and worried state, Karan puts his arm around her as she leans on him and closes her eyes. He then smirks and looks into the rearview mirror of the car, in which his reflection doesn't exist and Anjali is leaning on nothing (implying that he is a ghost, and that Karan actually did die in the swamp).
After this story, Neha gets frightened and wants to go back to the car. She asks Romi to walk her there but he refuses because he doesn't want to see Vikas. Neha leaves by herself.

### Story 2 — No Smoking

The second story is about a photographer, Anil (Saif Ali Khan), who checks into an inn while on his way to Mumbai. The manager and owner (Boman Irani) of the lodge is an eccentric man who insists that smoking is strongly prohibited in his inn. Anil becomes uneasy when he's unable to smoke and tries to reason with the hotel owner to let him smoke but is reminded about the diseases that come along with smoking. When Anil tries to leave the hotel completely, the owner then locks him inside, holds him at gunpoint, and tells him that in a matter of six months he can cure his addiction to smoking. He reveals that he had cured 70% of the people from smoking, while 30% had been murdered. The owner takes Anil to a basement and shows him piles of corpses, telling him that he tried to prevent them, but these people would not quit smoking. After six months, Anil (who is now clean shaven) is now working at the lodge, having succumbed to madness. When a client walks in smoking and asks him for a room, Anil tells him that smoking is strongly prohibited. The customer displays contempt by blowing a smoke on Anil’s face and Anil calmly shoots him dead while the owner laughs at the gunshot. The story ends with Anil and the owner sitting together, enjoying the Tom and Jerry show airing on the television and watching a commercial about the effects of smoking.
After this story, Suman thinks he saw someone in the forest. The group dismisses it as either him being scared or attempting to scare the others. Mehnaaz decides to go back to the car to retrieve a blanket. Romi asks if he should accompany to which she declines and then leaves by herself. As she leaves, Neha's dead body is shown lying in the forest. Mehnaaz is then chased around and eventually stabbed to death by the unseen assailant. Back at the bonfire, Amar thinks he may have heard Mehnaaz scream, but again the group dismisses the concern.

### Story 3 — Homework

The third story is that of a school teacher named Dayashankar Pandey (Raghuvir Yadav). He confronts a student named Pramila, who is always punished for not completing her homework. One day, when Pandey asks Pramila to hold out her hand for punishment (assuming that she did not do her homework), Pramila produces her homework instead. However, her homework elicits a strange reaction from Pandey. Following this, the incident repeats itself everyday, making Pandey increasingly anxious. Upon a suggestion from a coworker that she might be receiving help from her parents or a tutor, Pandey calls upon Pramila's mother (Revathi). She denies helping her daughter. He then asks about the Om sign that Pramila draws on every page of her homework. The mother shrugs it off, which forces Pandey to drop the topic. Later, Pandey decides to go to Pramila's house. He confronts Pramila's mother and tells her that he had an intelligent friend, Varun, who died when he fell off a building while flying kite with him (In reality, he had in jealousy pushed Varun off the building to his death) and that he thinks Pramila is a reincarnation of his friend. He says that Varun used to draw the Om sign similarly to what Pramila does now. He realizes that he is deranging and leaves apologizing. On the way back home, he is confronted by Varun's spirit, who warns him, "You are not insane yet. But you will be." By the following morning, Pandey loses his sanity, scribbling basic mathematics on the road with cars driving.
After telling this story, Amar gets worried about the girls that left earlier and decides to go look for them by himself. After reaching the car he finds Vikas alone and is shocked to see that he's dead with a slash wound on his neck. Up until this point in the film there were red herrings that implied Vikas could be the killer, but now it's apparent there's another person involved. Amar frantically runs back towards the others but is confronted by the killer in the forest.

### Story 4 — Apples

The fourth story focuses on a housewife named Gayatri (Shilpa Shetty). She goes to market and comes across a vendor (Rajpal Yadav), who is selling apples for Rs. 20 while everyone else is selling apples at Rs. 60. She buys the apples from the vendor, but his demeanour unsettles her. After returning home, she throws away the apples, but they inexplicably reappear inside the fridge. Gayatri's husband Sanjay (Sanjay Kapoor) eats one of the apples and finds it very tasty while watching a cricket match on tv. She worries that something might happen to Sanjay after eating the apples, as she harbours suspicions about the vendor. The next morning, when Gayatri wakes up, she is shocked to find an apple next to her instead of her husband. She runs outside to inform the police but they became apples as well. Slowly everyone on the street has turned into apples after eating them. The strange apple vendor then appears with an evil look, offering Gayatri his last apple for free.

### Story 5 — Ghostly Lift

In the fifth story, an elderly man named John Rodrigues (Nana Patekar) is standing near a graveyard by the highway at night. A young man Amar (Vivek Oberoi), drives by and offers John a lift. Through conversation, Amar assumes that John might be widowed and so was there to visit his wife's grave. However, John says that it is actually he who is dead. Amar dismisses it as a joke and plays along pretending that John is a ghost. He then asks John to vanish to prove he's a ghost and increasingly gets annoyed at John's insistence that he's not joking. John states that Amar's anger indicates that he is starting to get scared while Amar remains unfazed. John apologizes and shakes hands before showing that he's bleeding from gunshot wounds and gets blood on Amar. This is the last straw for Amar who is fed up and stops the car to physically remove John. At this point John reveals that he's a VJ for the show MTV Bakra (a program similar to Punk'd) in place of Cyrus, showing Amar his bag with a hidden camera and says that his crew is following them. He says Amar is the first person not to get scared by the prank and John asks him how he remained unnerved. Amar says that it was because he knew that John was not a ghost because he himself is a ghost. John thinks that Amar is now trying to play a prank, but Amar takes off his sunglasses, revealing his creepy hollowed dark black eyes as he moves closer to John and reminds him that ghosts can vanish as he vanishes right before John's eyes. John dies in shock upon witnessing this, as the MTV crew arrive at the scene.
After this story, the group wonders where all the others are. Suman suggests they all go together to check but Romi insists he will go by himself. Some time passes as Shruti and Suman chat with each other. Suddenly a strange man (Sushant Singh) joins them at the bonfire. He claims to live there and asks to hear a story too.

### Story 6 — Stop/Move

The sixth and final story is about a young student, Purab (Aftab Shivdasani), who has unrequited feelings for Abhilasha (Isha Koppikar), but is frustrated for being a social pariah. Purab contemplates suicide (by slitting his wrist in the washroom with a razor blade but is interrupted by his father saying that he’s late for work, drinking lots of tablets with a stinky smell in his room and jumping off from a high cliff outside) but vents about not being special in front of an idol, the idol then blinks a light and Purab leaves for school. Later, he discovers that he has developed an extraordinary ability – he can immobilize a particular person just by saying "Stop!" to them and he realizes that the idol gave him power from the blink. Purab uses his ability to freeze Abhilasha, and later demonstrates it to her by immobilizing a number of students in their college. Abhilasha, frightened of Purab’s power, agrees to date him. Thereafter at Night, Purab returns home dancing victoriously, Using the power to his Father to the way to his room (without telling him but his father knows that Purab is gone insane), and thinks about megalomaniac fantasies. In his delusion, Purab accidentally immobilizes himself while looking at the mirror by saying “stop”, trying to test himself in the mirror. His father and his mother finds him like that in his room, with a victorious smile frozen on his face, he shakes him but he does not reply. Purab is immediately rushed to the hospital, but in vain. On the way to the hospital, Abhilasha sees this on her home window.

### The Ending

The strange man tells the two friends that it is now his turn to tell a story. He tells them a story that they are partly familiar with.
A group of seven friends are travelling one night when their car breaks down. They seek shelter under a ruined shack and start telling stories to each other to kill time. After each story, one friend in the group (supposedly frightened) goes out into the forest and gets killed, one by one, until only two are left. The two friends that are left stop telling stories to each other and the killer, who is now bored, comes out to them. The killer appears to be the very same strange man that is narrating this story. Labelling himself a genius, he says that he cannot stand fear as it blocks progress, and he would kill anyone who is scared, and tells Shruti and Suman that their friends are all dead.
The man senses the fear in Suman and suddenly stabs him fatally. He commends Shruti for not being scared, but is upset to see that she has fled. He catches up to and stabs her, though she manages to bludgeon him with a rock soon after before passing out.
When day breaks, Shruti awakens and walks up to the main road to find the place swarming with policemen and her friends' corpses being taken into ambulances and sees the killer sitting on a car. She tries to tell the police that he is the murderer, but the policemen don't notice. The killer then points at a body, which she shockingly discovers to be her own. She realizes that she is now a ghost, as the killer then tells her there is nothing left to fear as everyone is dead, including himself. They are joined by the ghosts of her friends as the movie ends.

## Cast

* Nana Patekar as John Rodrigues
* Saif Ali Khan as Anil Manchandani
* Vivek Oberoi as Amar Vashisht
* Sanjay Kapoor as Sanjay Joshi, Gayatri's husband
* Sohail Khan as Karan Ahuja
* Shilpa Shetty as Gayatri Pandit
* Isha Koppikar as Abhilasha Malhotra
* Aftab Shivdasani as Purab Khandelwal
* Boman Irani as a hotel owner
* Sameera Reddy as Shruti Kapoor
* Gaurav Kapoor as Romi Yadav
* Antara Mali as Anjali Deshmukh, Karan's wife
* Raghuvir Yadav as Dayashankar Pandey (teacher)
* Anuj Pandit Sharma as Varun Goswami
* Revathi as Pramila's mother
* Rajpal Yadav as an apple vendor
* Sushant Singh as a serial killer
* Malavika as Neha Bhatia
* Rahul Singh as Dev Bohra
* Peeya Rai Chowdhary as Mehnaaz
* Kiku Sharda as Amar Varma, friend of Shruti
* Yusuf Hussain as Mr. Khandelwal: Purab’s father

## Soundtrack

The soundtrack features 6 songs composed by Salim–Sulaiman, with lyrics by Lalit Marathe.
Track listing:
* "Darna Mana Hai" (4:20) – Sunidhi Chauhan, Ninad Kamat, Naresh Kamat
* "Darna Mana Hai Remix" (4:15) – Sunidhi Chauhan, Ninad Kamat, Naresh Kamat
* "Homework" (5:11) – Clinton Cerejo, Aparna Jha, Vijay
* "Jo Dar Gaya Voh Mar Gaya" (4:45) – Sunidhi Chauhan, Salim Merchant, Naresh Kamat
* "No Smoking" (4:56) – Ravi Khote
* "Stop" (4:27) – Sonu Nigam, Sunidhi Chauhan

## Box office and reception

The film was a flop at the box office. Even though the film was a commercial failure at the box office it was praised for Prawaal Raman's direction and the performance of the cast was also praised.
The "Stop" segment was further developed into a feature film titled Gayab (2004) by Suresh Nair of The Times of India, Kona Venkat and Raman.