Locations in Europe: Romania
Storyline
Director/Producer: Vikram Bhatt (Director) / Mukesh Bhatt (Producer)
Line Producer/Executive Producer/ Associate Producer: Laura Dulea for Family Film- the Romanian company handling production in Romania. The entire stunt team was Romanian. Ragu Dragoi did the casting of extras. The rest of the Romanian crew (including actors) is not listed.
Star(s): Emraan Hashmi, Kriti Kharbanda, Gaurav Arora
Songs/Dance/Action: All located in Europe
Indian/ International Crew: Indian and International
Language: Hindi
Film Location Analysis
By Kaushik Bhaumik
The film is entirely shot in Romania over a period of five weeks in the freezing Romanian winter with temperatures hovering between -20 and -16 degrees on many days. The film explicitly connects the storyline of demonic possession to Transylvania- Dracula country. The Gothic architecture of the region is taken advantage of explicitly to frame the horror in the film. The grey winter light of course is ideally gloom and doom signifying. The indoor scenes take advantage of fire light and heat as well as orange glow to add a sense of drama and myth to the images of horror. The cold weather also allows for heightening the erotic intensity of hotel rooms- the bed linen and warming items, as does the sense of heating inside. The furniture in the film is uniformly polished to the brightness of mirrors. The quality of the wood of the oaken furniture is emphasized as a sign of retro-medieval glamour as well new corporate lifestyle fantasies that nevertheless occupy vast empty rooms signifying the utter solitude of NRI young people in a location such as Romania, as well as the general emptiness of their lives. This makes he furniture and other sculptural props in the film vaguely menacing (as they should be in films set in Transylvania).
The main Romanian location for the film was the medieval town of Sibiu in Saxon Transylvania, the town with the maximum medieval buildings in Romania- a mix of Baroque and Gothic. A number of songs and sequences take places in the Sibiu town square- The Piata Mare/Big Square. The heroine and the vampire meet a number of times on the square, as well as lovers in a flashback. In one sequence we see the statue of George Daniel Teutsch-a Transylvanian historian (an important member of one of Romania’s earliest modern cultural institutions ASTRA) and Lutheran (Augsburg Confession) bishop. The sequence on the square where three men meet is followed by two men walking down the stairs in a distinctly Gothic surrounding with the Lutheran Cathedral of Saint Mary towering over the figures in the background. The rainy weather in Sibiu during the shoot made life difficult for the crew trying to shoot a lot of complicated sequences in a tight schedule, bit it did add to the feeling of Gothic dread in the air. A long song and romantic sequence in the second half of the film where the heroine and the vampire spend a night in a hotel was shot in the town of Sinaia, near Bucharest. A casino/hotel was converted into a hotel catering to the needs of the sequence. Sinaia railway station was used in a sequence early on in the film where the hero of the film arrives to join his wife.
The domestic/indoor horror scenes were all shot in the famous Snagov Palace outside Bucharest located on the shores of the eponymous lake. The Palace had been built for the Romanian Royal family and after that served as the summer retreat for Nicolae Ceausescu, the last Communist dictator of Romania. A number of horror sequences are shot in the Palace one of which is a spectacular harness-work vampiric sequence where the heroine climbs up the walls of the Snagov Palace like spider or a lizard. She does another such harness sequence up the more medieval walls of Sibiu.
Some sequences are shot in the Hoia Baciu forest west of the city Cluj-Napoca. The forest is famous in local lore as home to paranormal phenomena and UFO sightings etc. However, ,the location is very sparsely used, surprising since the film is all about demonic possessions and so on. The sequence in the Sinaia hotel feature paintings of strigois who are troubled spirits in Slavic mythologyrisen from the graves who can shapeshift into animals, become invisible etc. and gain vitality from their victim’s blood. It is the strigoi myth that Stoker used to create Dracula.
An interesting feature of the media surrounding the film is that some of the key song videos don’t stick to the original location of the songs- they mix them up and add new locations, especially in Sibiu which are not actually seen in the film. For example, the film Lo Man Liya is set in the film in the Sinaia hotel sequence but mixes up sequences shot in Snagov, Bucharest or Sibiu. We see the heroine walk down Cetatii Street past the iconic Turghul Dulgherilor (The Carpenters’ Tower) built by the Saxon guild of carpenters of Sibiu, part of the third ring of the town’s fortifications, built in the 14th c. which is not part of the original film.
Additional Information and Links
Vishesh Films page for the film: https://www.productionservicenetwork.com/raaz-reboot/
Video for song ‘Lo man liya’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSGYVl4ZgRs
