Writer and director Syed Shadan isn’t interested in making horror films about ghosts. What haunts him are ideas. His latest short, Chaar Diwari, which has become the only Indian offering screened at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival this year, is built around that belief.

“The implication of things is much more horrifying than defining what you should be scared of. That’s why I’ve always been more interested in ideas that haunt us rather than ghosts. Here, the house itself is the ghost, swallowing people whole,” said Shadan, of the film that premièred at the festival on July 31.