Found-footage horror has always had one big advantage I think – if the filmmakers get the illusion right, you stop watching actors in a horror movie and start wondering why the hell somebody was filming this in the first place, and Video is having a proper go at that idea.
The Tharle Gang has just reached one million subscribers and decides that celebrating by visiting one of India’s most notorious haunted locations is a much better idea than doing anything remotely sensible – they head to Padmapur School in Odisha during a lunar eclipse, but disappear during the trip.
Three months later, a travelling couple discovers their abandoned cameras, and the footage becomes the evidence used to reconstruct what happened.
The film was released in Indian cinemas on September 11, 2026.
Srinidhi Bengaluru Wanted the Cameras to Be the Movie
Director and writer Srinidhi Bengaluru had already established a habit of making slightly unusual genre films before moving into horror – his feature debut Blink was a 2024 Kannada science-fiction thriller involving time and fate, while his 2026 fantasy-comedy series Jerax moved in a completely different direction.
So, Video is his third major screen outing and is another attempt to take a genre format that has been done plenty of times elsewhere and make it work inside Kannada cinema, and the director has explained that he actually had Video written after Blink, before making Jerax.
Srinidhi and cinematographer Avinaasha Shastry also used between seven and 12 action cameras, depending on the scene, as the director wasn’t interested in making the footage look artificially terrible just because that is what found-footage horror is supposed to look like.
Reviews have noted the use of GoPro-style cameras, Osmo Mobile footage, CCTV and handheld material, while the official production approach also involved body-camera perspectives and screen recordings, so the result is closer to a collection of digital evidence than the traditional shaky-camera horror format.
And there is another technical decision that could easily have gone wrong – there is no conventional background score telling you when to be scared – Srinidhi specifically cited No Country for Old Men as an influence because of the way that film uses silence and ambient sound rather than constantly pushing music underneath everything, and while the composer Prasanna Kumar M S still contributed music, the horror relies more heavily on environmental sound and silence.
The Cast Had to Learn How to Be YouTubers
The main cast includes Bharatha, Jeevan Shivakumar, Tejesh S M, Priya J Achar and Nalme Nachiyar, with Dheekshith Shetty also appearing – Bharatha, Jeevan Shivakumar and Tejesh S M play members of the Tharle Gang, while Priya J Achar and Nalme Nachiyar complete the central group.
Reports around the production say the cast trained with vlogging exercises to get the right behaviour into the performances, and there is also a useful connection between the director and several members of the cast – Jeevan Shivakumar and Bharath K Tumkuru, for example, were both in Jerax, while Sanjeev Jagirdar, who edits Video, also worked on that series.
The film is also interesingly the first production released under the Dhee Cinemas banner, ran by Dheekshith Shetty.
They Tried the Hollywood Early-Screening Trick
The marketing campaign was almost as unusual as the film itself, because Srinidhi decided to hold a special screening around 20 days before the theatrical release, inspired by the way horror movies such as The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity used early audience reactions and word of mouth, so the filmmakers ran a horror-story competition and asked people to make three-minute videos describing frightening experiences from their own lives.
Around 20 creators were selected based on the response to their videos and invited to the early screening, although tickets were also made available to the wider public – the idea was fairly straightforward – get genuine horror fans into the cinema, see whether the film actually scares them, and let those reactions become part of the promotion before the September 11 release.
The official trailer even plays with that concept, because instead of behaving like a normal horror trailer, it begins with footage of the special screening and audience reactions before showing more conventional material from the movie.
The Horror Gets Much Uglier in the Second Half
This is where the early reviews get particularly useful, because people seem to agree on the basic shape of the movie even when they disagree on how well it works – India Today praised the camerawork, editing and sound design but said the film struggles to sustain its mystery when it matters most, while The Times of India similarly gave it 3/5, praising the technical execution while noting that the increasingly graphic second half may be too much for some viewers.
The second half apparently takes the film considerably further than the marketing initially suggests, bringing in cannibalism and black-magic rituals and pushing the A-rated horror into much more graphic territory, which has created one of the more noticeable divides in the audience reaction – some viewers have praised the gore for going places they don’t normally see in Kannada cinema, while others think the later material relies too heavily on jump scares and loses some of the atmosphere built earlier.
The early box-office figures are modest so far, with tracker recording roughly ₹0.07 crore net in India on opening day, based on 40.1% occupancy in its live update, while FilmiBeat’s later figures put the film at approximately ₹0.87 crore India net / ₹0.98 crore worldwide at time of writing.
Check out some more Indian horror movies.
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