MTV Dark Scroll: The greatest guilty pleasure on Indian television is a paranormal reality show hosted by Amit Sadh

But in these dark times, there has emerged a ray of hope. Produced by the resilient folks at MTV, the show is called Dark Scroll, and it provides, without exaggeration, more joy than any other programme currently airing on television. You don’t just watch Dark Scroll at your convenience, after, say, a long day of work, or a particularly exhausting lecture from your tuition sir. Dark Scroll doesn’t come to you; you have to go to the show. It’s appointment viewing of the top order. Unlike the reality TV fix currently being provided by the likes of FlyingBeast, Uorfi Javed and BeerBiceps — they’re more alike than you think — Dark Scroll demands an effort on the audience’s part.

And it repays that effort with the sort of unhinged entertainment that had gone all but extinct on Indian television. So cartoonish are its conflicts, so sloppy its structure, and so embarrassing its core philosophy that if you felt any guiltier for watching it, you’d probably enroll yourself in a half-marathon, or come clean to your spouse.

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Dark Scroll features drama between the contestants.

The show is hosted by Amit Sadh, whose job is to essentially narrate campfire stories to a bunch of 20-somethings in a forest, and then send them into purportedly haunted ‘havelis’ in Uttarakhand to gather proof of paranormal activity. Sadh’s approach to hosting keeps changing with every passing week; it’s almost as if they began shooting without a firm idea in place. Each ‘investigation’ is spread across three episodes, in which the contestants — they’re called ‘seekers’, by the way — enter supposedly haunted locations in three teams, and use a gizmo of some kind to document their interactions with ghosts. Only, everybody appears to have been forbidden from using the word ‘ghost’ on the show. They are described, instead, as ‘entities’.

It is a cardinal sin on Dark Scroll to tell an ‘entity’ that it has, in fact, passed. Although it’s apparently acceptable to taunt one by eating its matar paneer lunch. One contestant is given a proper scolding by Sadh for breaking made-up rules during their investigation. “You put your teammates in danger,” he says gravely. Of what? We don’t know. Probably possession, but we’ll get to those in a moment.

As punishment, the contestant is instructed to spend the rest of the night all alone in the spooky location, with Sadh monitoring hours of inactivity from behind a computer screen a few hundred metres away. Like everything else in Dark Scroll, these punishments feel entirely arbitrary as well. In one episode, Sadh sweeps in to ‘rescue’ a kid who’s doing penance for messing up during a task. “I’m here, babu,” he says. But it’s telling that the contestant was punished not for disrespecting the dead — or, even telling the dead that they’re dead — but for dangerously dangling off a derelict ledge.

In another episode, the punishment segment is axed entirely because a girl named Mian Mian — she gave herself this name — comes close to being ‘possessed’ for the third time. The previous two scenarios weren’t pleasant for anybody, but Sadh played along. He snaps after Mian Mian appears to become possessed again, and tells her, as politely as he can, that she is being evicted from the show. You wonder why, because she was clearly the one having the most experiences. While some others were praised for making ‘connections’ with the ‘entities’, Mian Mian, as it turns out, was pushing the boundaries of believability. During one investigation, she is taken over by the spirit of a thief of some kind, and begins yelling menacingly at her teammates. Her performance is so convincing that her fellow ‘seekers’ properly freak out. Later, she goes completely limp after interacting (via blinking lights) with the ghost of a sultan.

But for a show about the paranormal, there’s frightfully little that actually happens in Dark Scroll. Two experts named Sarbajeet and Pooja — both use ‘scientific’ tools, but the latter is a psychic who relies on vivid visions — weigh in on the seekers’ performance, although there isn’t much to judge here. Most of the contestants appear to be viewing the show as a launchpad into the entertainment industry anyway, and as the season progresses, their interpersonal relationships become more dramatic than their supposed interactions with the ghosts of a ‘peon ji’ and a ‘manager sir’. Sarba and Pooja are also behind the three-step structure of the investigations — the seekers are first instructed to acclimatise themselves in the spooky hotspots; this is followed by a round in which one of them triggers the entities by snacking on their lunch or damaging their property; the investigation culminates with an attempt at communication.

Every episode introduces a new gadget and technique — the seekers are taught to form something called an ‘energy tornado’ one time — but no matter what they throw at those pesky ghosts, they experience nothing. They scream more often from on-set sirens than an ‘actual’ paranormal encounter. Of course, they claim to hear noises all the time, but the show invariably drowns them out under loud sound effects. Sarba and Pooja however, attribute everything – even a gust of wind  – to ‘trickster entities’ who, they say, have the power to read minds and target vulnerabilities. Remember the guy who was scolded for climbing on a ledge? Sarba and Pooja have a serious conversation about whether that could have been the doing of a ghost.

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Aparshakti Khurana and Amit Sadh in Dark Scroll.

Aparshakti Khurana shows up in one episode, dressed inappropriately for a ghost hunt. He claims to have heard some footsteps in his vicinity during the investigation, but even he doesn’t seem entirely convinced. Neither Aparshakti nor any other celebrity guest shows up again, not because it’s too scary, but probably because having celebrity guests wasn’t something that MTV had planned in advance for. The paranormal investigation format was popularised around two decades ago by the hit shows Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures; both of which occasionally featured famous people as guests. The format peaked with the 2018 feature ‘documentary’ Demon House, in which paranormal investigator Zak Bagans — he has alternatively been described as a showman and a charlatan — buys the most haunted house in America, and proceeds to spend a night in it.

What made the movie so effective was Bagans’ genius decision to approach the case as a skeptic. This went against his entire brand, but sensing an entirely new audience, he spent over an hour doing what every rational-minded observer would, and tried to debunk every claim made about the house. It was only in the final 10 minutes that he actually locked himself in it, and by then, it didn’t even matter if he experienced anything. Neither Ghost Hunters nor Ghost Adventures bother pleading with the audience to buy what they were selling. They had what Karan Johar would describe as conviction.

But for all the joy that Dark Scroll provides, it always comes across as a tad tentative, a tad unconvinced by itself. At one point, Sarba dares skeptics to spend a night in a ‘haunted’ location themselves before scoffing at folks like him. “People say there’s no such thing as the paranormal, but come to the location, experience the presence, and then talk,” he says, breaking the illusion immediately. A paranormal investigator can acknowledge the existence of ghosts all they like, but under no circumstance should they acknowledge the existence of logic and reason.