The horror genre is quietly Hollywood’s most consistently bankable lane in which inexpensive features can quadruple their budgets and small screen scares can morph into full-fledged phenomenons. Netflix knows this all too well. Sandra Bullock’s Bird Box was a meme-generating attention-grabber, and Stranger Things pairs quite nicely with The Haunting of Hill House to form a formidable one-two punch for the streamer. While the company just suffered through a sour Wall Street downturn, the immediate future is brighter and it starts with the new horror sensation, Typewriter, now streaming on Netflix.
What is Typewriter? So glad you asked, but before we answer, please grab on to something comforting.
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Typewriter is about a haunted house and a haunted book that stir the imagination of a group of young, wannabe ghost hunters, and a dog, determined to capture the ghost that plagues the notorious home in their neighborhood in Goa, a coastal region of India. When a new family and their captivating daughter move into the haunted home, the crew finds it difficult to balance the demands of school and chores with the renewed urgency to capture the neighborhood ghost before it is too late.
Typewriter is just five episodes, a quick binge of excellent scares and surprising depth from creator Sujoy Ghosh. Despite low awareness and a relative lack of a marketing push, the series is already kicking up quite the stir on social media.
@sujoy_g @NetflixIndia i watched typewriter last night and wants to thanks and congratulate sujoy and Netflix for the amazing series. Actually I skipped the dinner for that becoz my mind was not ready to do anything before completing it🙂supeb and 💯. #bhootisjhuth pic.twitter.com/pigtQ4Wm4o
— Medha R Singh (@MedhaRSingh1) July 22, 2019
Watch Typewriter on Netflix it’s bloody amazing
— Chris Tatum 🌹 (@christatum49) July 24, 2019
https://twitter.com/unveiledpoetry/status/1154883499364499457?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1154883499364499457&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.highsnobiety.com%2Fp%2Fnetlfix-typewriter-reactions%2F
#Typewriter has been watched and it’s definitely not for the faint hearted! Couldn’t see it without looking around to check if all ok in the house! @sujoy_g stop making all this scary spooky stuff ! pic.twitter.com/4HYhx2NsaT
— taapsee pannu (@taapsee) July 21, 2019
Watched #typewriter on Netflix. Definitely not for the faint hearted. Very engaging and horrifying
— Soumya (@somianand) July 22, 2019
Typewriter, like all great scary stories, is based on local legends and employs escalating tension to keep audiences riveted and increasingly out of sorts. Before we meet with our present-day main characters, the show opens with a flashback where we meet author Madhav Mathews, hard at work on his next novel The Ghost of Sultanpore. While writing, his granddaughter Jenny interrupts, terrified that she can hear a ghost in her room. Mathews just wants her to feel safe so he explains that ghosts aren’t real and that she has nothing to be afraid of (famous last words). But when they return to her room, the real Jenny is under the bed.
Boom. We’re off.
If you’re looking for your next binge, here it is.
