[1] Shot over the course of 30 days,[2] Zibahkhana premiered at the NatFilm Festival in Denmark and has been screened at festivals including Toronto, New York City, London, Neuchatel, Stockholm, Cape Town, Austin, Philadelphia, Cambridge, Puerto Rico, Sitges, Valencia, Oslo and Helsinki.
Making up the motley crew are head-strong driver Vicki, poor scholar student Simon, wild child Roxi, horror fan OJ, and nervous, demure Ash.
Roxi is spooked by the severed head and runs into the jungle, eventually finding Vicki's corpse being butchered by the maniac.
A kind old woman takes her in and laments the loss of her son to marriage and the new motorway cutting off her village from the world.
Ash is chased through the woods, eventually defeating the maniac by fashioning a weapon from barbed wire and a stick and beating her to death with a rock.
The PVR cinema group in India picked up the Indian distribution after a screening at Osian's Film Festival in Delhi.
The film was due to open in 14 select cinemas around the country but that was derailed by the Terror Attacks on Mumbai after which relations between India and Pakistan were badly soured.
Ain't It Cool News praised the film, calling it "one of the most badass flicks of the year".
The reviewer also noted that although the film had its faults, mainly that it was stupid and predictable, "it's got something so incredibly captivating about it that it has its own place in the line of truly great indie horror flicks".
[5] Dread Central awarded the film a score of 4/5, calling it "a genuinely weird and somber horror movie that transposes familiar narrative themes from the genre into a cultural aesthetic few in the West will have had any prior glimpse of.
However many critics in the West are unfamiliar with the fact that in most South Asian cities The local language is frequently a blend of English and Urdu, sometimes referred to as "Minglish" and being British colonies a large percentage of schools and universities use English as the primary language of instruction.