We guess Ram Gopal Varma had it coming. After all, the well-known Bollywood film producer and director audaciously claimed that his latest film, Phoonk, was so frightening, so terrifying … so mind-meltingly scary … that no person could watch it alone.

Of course, it’d be impossible to challenge such a claim, since the new movie (about a family that becomes the target of “black magic” attacks) is currently exclusively in movie theaters.

But 30-year-old Pavin Ponanna did just that. According to news reports, the advertising professional spent around $1,100 to rent an entire 227-seat cinema in Bangalore … for an audience of one, himself. Before he sat down to watch Phoonk, he visited a temple to prepare for the horrors to come, and even asked the multiplex’s staff to have a doctor on call during the screening.

The verdict?

“I never felt scared, not even for a moment,” he said. “I took just ten minutes to settle down.”

Well … that was friggin’ anticlimactic. Of course, Ponanna could have read this review at DesiPundit and saved himself a grand: “Nothing, just nothing, esapes Ram Gopal Varma’s malevolent gaze in the black magic thriller Phoonk,” the film critic wrote. “Soft toys, calendar art, religious icons, felled branches by the roadside — just about everything on screen is transformed into a shamanistic fetish object, intended to spook the daylights out of a gleefully complicit audience. Part B-movie, part boo-movie, Phoonk is the silliest thing Varma has attempted in years…”

Being big-big Bollywood and horror fans, we’ll snag a DVD of Phoonk when it’s released in the U.S. and see if the flick is either as terrifying as its director claims, or as dumb as the adman says. In the meantime, here’s the Hindi-language trailer for Phoonk — which does look spooky, we admit.

Mined by: J.C. “I Ain’t ‘Fraid Of No Ghost … Until It Posesses A Little Girl And Makes Her Fly Onto The Ceiling” Hutchins, via Fark