“It’s very simple: horror and sex combined make it horrex,” says Bhushan Patel, director of Ragini MMS-2 and Alone (2015). How does one accurately define horrex? Especially since the neologism was introduced to us with mercenary motives. On Ma, Bombay Times published another piece, which carried the headline : “Sunny to take a break from ‘horrex’.” The article, much like its predecessor, began with the meaning of horrex, and concluded with the film’s release date, the only difference being this time, it got the date right. But the efforts to sell a film based on the already bankable sub-genre had begun. Before August 11, 2013, the word had not made its way to Indian broadsheets or tabloids. That article didn’t get the film’s release date right, but it did achieve something else – labeling that sub-genre of horror films we were familiar with, but didn’t have a name for: horrex. Ragini MMS-2 didn’t release over the mentioned weekend the film came out more than five months later. The only quote in the story came from the film’s producer, Ekta Kapoor, who said straight-faced: “As Ragini MMS-2 is a hardcore Horrex (a fusion of horror and sex), it doesn’t get more auspicious than flagging off its promotion on Eid!” On August 11, 2013, Bombay Times published a small article on its front page, whose headline read : “Sunny Leone wishes Eid Mubarak from LA.” The piece informed the readers that Leone’s next film, Ragini MMS-2, was scheduled to release in two month’s time, over the Dussehra weekend. It’s a thriller directed by Rumi Jafry and featuring Amitabh Bachchan, Krystle D’Souza and Rhea Chakraborty.Why do horrex heroines in Bollywood rarely get to take charge when it comes to ghostbusting? What should really scare them is a creature that walks on two legs. But I’m not getting any creative fulfilment,” remarked Hashmi who will next be seen in Chehre which is set for theatrical release on August 27. “I am maturing as an actor, but I am forced to choose these scripts because this is what’s working, and in our industry, we want Xerox copies of everything. I reached a saturation point, even though those films were doing very well at the box office,” Hashmi said, adding that the actor in him wanted to do more. “I realised I was getting sick of it… Because those films were giving me a very ‘been there done that’ feeling. That became a talking point,” Hashmi recalled.īut with the passage of time, he didn’t like the idea. Back then, when I started in 2003, it was this ‘aha’ moment to see a guy who’s kissing all his heroines. And you had a country that was obsessive about this sexuality and portraying it on screen. This tag was given to me by myself as a joke, and then it blew up… the media started talking about it, and that superseded everything. “For the first 10 years of my career, I was doing these films and I, unfortunately, have done it to myself. Now, Hashmi has said in another interview that he got sick of being the guy who was kissing all his heroines.