Koyal AI and Waveband say Jamlok is the first AI horror film

Koyal AI, a Y Combinator-backed AI filmmaking company, and the Indian production house Waveband Production are partnering on Jamlok, a multilingual horror film the two companies are billing as the world's first AI horror film, with the first poster unveiled on October 10 at the Uncanny India festival at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi.

Neither company disclosed financial terms. According to the announcement, the project is expected to be completed within three months, and the makers said they are in talks with actors from Bollywood and the Telugu film industry, known as Tollywood. Cast, release date and distribution have not been announced.

Koyal co-founder and CEO Mehul Agarwal described Jamlok as the world's first AI horror film. He said the film would retain the emotional performances of real actors while AI builds the backgrounds, sets, extras, visual assets and costumes. AI will also be used to incorporate the actors' likenesses into the production, according to the announcement. Producer Amarnath Jhunjhunwala (called Amar Jhunjhunwala in the announcement) and Waveband co-founder Shikha Karan Ahluwalia attended the unveiling, The News Station reported.

Koyal is a San Francisco company founded in 2025 by siblings Mehul and Gauri Agarwal, listed in Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch with a team of five, according to its Y Combinator page. That listing says Koyal has worked with the music labels Universal Music and T-Series and the Bollywood studio Maddock Entertainment, and made music videos for A.R. Rahman, Shankar Mahadevan and Ricky Kej that each crossed 1.5 million views.

At the same festival, Koyal presented Koyal 3.0, the latest version of its AI filmmaking platform. The company says the platform turns a script or a voice recording into a film, with emphasis on keeping characters and locations consistent.

Waveband Production produced the 2025 Hindi comedy Mastiii 4. Its founders are producer Amarnath Jhunjhunwala and co-founder Shikha K. Ahluwalia, who has more than 15 years in production, according to its team page. Ahluwalia also sat on the short-film jury at Uncanny India, the News Station reported.

Uncanny India was the first Indian edition of Koyal's Uncanny Valley Fest, which has also run at Y Combinator in San Francisco, at SXSW in Austin and at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, according to the festival's event listing. The Delhi edition was a 12-hour filmmaking competition across short films, music videos and advertising films.

If the three-month timeline holds, Jamlok would test whether generative AI can carry a feature-length Indian film rather than isolated shots and backgrounds. Its impact will depend on the finished film and on how audiences respond to AI in the production, The News Station's Parimal Kumar wrote.

Next milestone: Koyal and Waveband say they are talking to Bollywood and Telugu actors, with the film planned to finish in about three months; no cast, release date or distributor has been announced.