For a country that keeps producing entirely new reasons to lose sleep, Indian horror has remained frustratingly committed to recycling old ones. Haunted havelis, cursed villages, ancestral sins, forgotten folklore — the genre seems to have exhausted every original idea that doesn’t involve turning to the past as an inexhaustible source of terror. But upcoming filmmaker Syed Shadan’s Chaar Diwari points the camera somewhere considerably more contemporary. Premiered at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival as the festival’s only Indian selection and winning the Bronze Audience Award and Best Asian Short, the independently produced psychological horror film builds off an experience familiar to almost every young Mumbaikar: a broker saying, ‘ek perfect flat hai.‘ Set in Mumbai, the film follows a tenant whose suspiciously affordable apartment begins shrinking around him, turning one of the city’s most relatable nightmares into a very literal manifestation of its suffocating housing crisis. The approach reflects how Shadan understands horror itself. He sees it as an elastic form capable of carrying deeply personal stories. “If you want to talk about whatever it is that needs a certain kind of processing, it needs to be very engaging and something very primal,” he says.