Bhooty Call - Anjaan: SCU

It's very tempting to compare Anjaan: Special Crimes Unit (2018) to the X-Files.  After all, both series feature a skeptic and a true believer investigating paranormal cases, and both shows combine "mythology" episodes which are tightly tied to an ongoing plotline with monsters of the week.  (Or monsters of the day - during its original run Anjaan ran on a soap opera schedule rather than as a weekly show.)  In this case, our skeptic is tough talking Mumbai cop Vikrant Singhal (Gashmeer Mahajani) and the true believer is psychic rookie cop Shivani Joglekar (Cherry Mardia), who just wants to find out what happened to her brother; later Delhi police officer Aditi Sharma (Heema Parmar) joins the team. 

Rather than aliens and liver eating mutants, the Special Crimes Unit deals with cases involving ghosts and cursed objects, along with the occasional yellow eyed demon and one vishkanya in a small but crucial role.  The big difference between Anjaan and the X-Files, though, is the way the officers are treated.  Mulder and Scully are considered a laughingstock, work out of a basement, and constantly have to worry about conspiracies above them in the chain of command.  Vikrant and the gang work out of their own (admittedly haunted) police station, and they are respected and generally deferred to by the other police they encounter.  Broadly speaking, when there's something strange in a given neighborhood, the local police know whom to call.

However, the X-Files isn't the only series that Anjaan reminds me of.  Some major plot elements are very reminiscent of the gloriously cheesy Nineties superhero serial Shaktimaan.  Both shows prominently feature mysterious sages, ancient symbols, heroes of uncertain parentage, and a drug that can turn humans into demons, and both Anjaan's Vanraj and Shaktimaan's Tamraj Kilvish are Satanic figures devoted to spreading evil and sin through the human world. The tone is entirely different, of course, and Vanraj comes across as Kilvish's edgy younger brother.

So is it scary?  Well, sometimes.  It's a show made for TV audiences, which means that gore is limited, and they tend to lean into Bollywood ghost story tropes rather than try to subvert them, which can make the scary moments kind of predictable.  On the other hand, those same tropes are often very well executed; I'm still a little unsettled by the haunted wedding bus and the hungry old lady, as well as the way the yellow eyed demons move.  One final word of warning, though: the baddies on this show can and do sometimes harm children, so if that's an issue, this may not be the show for you.