Bayam Oru Payanam

Bayam Oru Payanam (Fear is a journey) is an Indian Tamil-language horror film written and directed by Manisharma. The film features Vishakha Singh, Bharath Reddy and Meenakshi Dixit in the leading roles, while Singampuli plays a pivotal supporting role. Featuring music composed by YR Prasad, production for the film began in mid-2015. The film was released on 25 August 2016 in India.

“We were shooting in jungles of Kerala, in the cold, mostly during night shifts. We were shooting for 19 hours a day, sometimes even 21 hours a day and we were shooting back-to-back. Each day, the entire unit in the morning would apply a lot of ointments to prevent leech bites. However, everybody got bitten except me because my assistant used to give me eucalyptus oil to apply on my legs and hands first.Then, I used to apply salt on my skin to keep the leeches away. Lastly, when I would get into my costumes, we used to use Hit spray on my clothes to keep insects away, one thing that has happened after the shoot is that I am stopped being afraid of horror films”

The film opens as the child of a photo journalist Ram (Bharath Reddy) has a nightmare of his father’s car meeting with a terrible accident and the very next day he has to go alone to a forest to shoot some pictures. A broker Kavariman (Singampuli) guides Ram to a deserted bungalow whose watchman Yogi Babu lets them in for a bribe and some liquor. Well past midnight inside the house Ram finds a memory card and in it there are pictures of a girl in a compromising position whom he recognizes and calls one of his friends in Chennai and tries to email them but fails. Thereafter he undergoes a scary time as a hideous woman appears in the bathroom, the fridge and his bedroom causing him to panic and leave the house. Driving his car all through the way he gets into one scary situation after the other and finally finds out why the ghost is after him but only after a great personal tragedy.

On the downside the story the director keeps on establishing that the hero is seeing ghosts in scene after scene, thereby diluting the fear factor. Vishaka Singh’s ghost character seems to have so much power to influence the hero, making him see ghosts and is with him all the time and it defies logic why she waits till the very end to kill him. Can he go back to his place to see his wife and daughter? Will the ghost continue to haunt him and his family?

Manisharma began Bayam Oru Payanam during mid-2015 and revealed that the film was "almost complete" by October 2015. Vishakha Singh, Bharath Reddy and Meenakshi Dixit were announced to be playing the lead roles in the film, with the makers describing it as a "female-orientated, horror film". The team shot a twenty-day schedule in Munnar during late December 2015, with Vishakha Singh portraying a ghost in her scenes. Filming for the project ended during January 2016 after a schedule in Chennai, with post-production works beginning thereafter.