When Stree was released in 2018, it seemed to arrive as a breath of fresh, haunted air. Directed by Amar Kaushik and starring Shraddha Kapoor and Rajkummar Rao, the film was marketed as a “horror comedy,” a label that until then had mostly meant slapstick with jump scares.

But Stree was something else. Sly, self-aware, and rooted in a distinctly Indian anxiety about gender and folklore. Its ghost was not a foreign demon but a vengeful spirit born of patriarchy. The humour came not from mocking fear but from recognising its absurd persistence.

In the years that followed, Maddock Films, the studio behind Stree, sensed it had stumbled upon a formula, and, more importantly, a franchise.

Bhediya (2022), Munjya (2024), and Stree 2: Sarkate Ka Aatank (2024) followed, stitched together with cameos and crossovers, finally culminating in Thamma (2025), the latest entry in what is now known, with a mix of pride and irony, as the "Maddock Horror Comedy Universe."

What began as a sharp, inventive commentary on social paranoia has, by 2025, become an enterprise both aware of its mythology and uncertain how to renew it.

Stree 2: Sarkate Ka Aatank, directed again by Amar Kaushik and serving as a direct sequel to his 2018 film, takes its cues from the events of the prequel. This time, it weaves another tale of horror and comedy set in the small town of Chanderi, where the same characters created by Raj and DK, face the challenges of confronting a beheaded demon.

While this instalment lacks its predecessor's finely tuned thrills and spills, it still manages to have its share of moments. Kaushik succeeds in presenting a socially conscious examination of chauvinistic practices, even as the integration of the film’s horror elements with its social message sometimes feels uneven. Still, Stree 2 has enough going for it to make for engaging viewing.

Bhediya (2022) took the franchise into the realm of transformation, weaving environmental fables with folklore. Beneath its visual spectacle and comic flair lay a parable about the beast within. The animal instincts we suppress, the violence we inherit, and the choices that define how we unleash them.

The film suggested that beauty and brutality coexist in all of us, and that the real horror may lie not in the creature we become but in our refusal to confront it.

Munjya, meanwhile, attempts to extend the Maddock universe into darker folklore, blending the supernatural with an undercurrent of romantic obsession. The result is tonally uneven but intermittently engaging, buoyed by moments of absurd humour and visual ingenuity.

The film gestures toward a new mythology but seldom deepens it; its ambitions exceed its emotional reach. You sense the craft, the investment, the careful world-building, and yet what emerges feels curiously weightless, as if the universe itself were expanding faster than its imagination.

By contrast, Thamma feels like a film performing its cleverness back to an audience already trained to recognise it. It dazzles in fragments, a witty line here, a striking image there, but never escapes the comfort of its own legend.

The sense of danger, of discovery, has receded. Instead, what dominates is an almost curatorial nostalgia: the universe referencing itself, polishing its past. The irony is that a franchise built on exposing cultural stagnation now finds itself mired in it.

This isn't to deny the craftsmanship. The Maddock films are slickly produced, tonally nimble, and often visually playful. But their humour has hardened into formula, their politics into gesture. The self-referentiality that once felt daring now reads as brand maintenance. Even the ghosts seem to know they are here to entertain, not to unsettle.

What Thamma exposes, perhaps unintentionally, is the exhaustion that comes with universe-building. To sustain a mythology, one must not only expand it but also reimagine its moral core. The Marvelisation of Indian genre cinema, and this urge to link, tease, and cross-pollinate, risks flattening what made Stree compelling in the first place: its specificity.

In Chanderi’s folklore, the ghost was not just a plot device; she was a mirror held up to the town’s anxieties. In Thamma, she becomes an Easter egg.

There’s a telling moment midway through Thamma when a character remarks, “Every story ends where it began.” It’s meant to sound profound, but it lands like an inadvertent confession. The Maddock Horror Comedy Universe has indeed come full circle, back to the ghost it once raised so imaginatively, but now embalmed in franchise logic.

And yet, perhaps there’s something revealing in this fatigue. Indian cinema, after decades of treating horror as camp or cheap thrill, finally found a voice that was funny, local, and politically resonant. That it now struggles to evolve may say less about Maddock than about the larger industry’s fear of letting a good thing die. In the end, the ghost that haunts Thamma is not the one on screen but the spectre of repetition itself.

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