In India, there has been only one long thread of horror films, that of the Ramsays, with Ram Gopal Varma and Vikram Bhatt in more recent years making slicker movies in the genre – more in the psychological-horror field than straight-out curse-and-monster, good-and-evil, blood-and-gore horror. In that Ramsay filmography, one man stands out as a true-blue ‘monster’: Ajay Agarwal. Given different circumstances, he could have been one for the ages, really.

I read somewhere that Agarwal, born Anirudh but credited as Ajay in the Ramsay ventures, was over seven feet tall. ‘Seven feet! No, no, no,’ he laughs, a booming sound that seems to be coming from seven or eight feet up. ‘I am six-four. Maybe six-five. That’s all. Tall, but not too tall. People think I am taller, but that’s because Gangu Ramsay shot me in such a way that I looked bigger.’

So he was tall, rangy and . . .