Exclusive Pics: Alaya F goes Halloween shopping; shares spooky experiences

It’s time for ‘trick or treat’ as Halloween is here. And on the occasion, Alaya F tried her best to pull off the spookiest get-up she can exclusively for Bombay Times. As she got busy picking up the ghostly props, Alaya tells us that the best Halloween parties she ever attended were when she was staying in New York.
She says, “I was studying there for three years. They take Halloween very seriously there.On the streets, everyone is dressed up in the most interesting and insane outfits. There used to be so many college parties it was really fun.”
Ask Alaya about how she would prefer dressing up for Halloween and she says, “I like art a lot and I am a little artistic. So, I enjoy painting my face. Your outfit can be relatively simple, you can put on black horns as your headgear and then just paint your face and it looks perfect. In case you start sweating and your makeup starts melting it looks even scarier (laughs).”
Usually game for Halloween parties, this year Alaya says she prefers staying at home and watching “a semi-horror film”, for a “scaredy cat” that she is, which is contrasting to her choices of horror films while growing up. “Back then my friends and I used to have these sleepovers where we would watch horror movies like The Ring, The Grudge and Paranormal Activity. I used to get really spooked while watching Paranormal Activity because it is so realistic! I feel the more realistic a horror film is, the more it scares you,” says the Jawaani Jaaneman actress.

If not horror films, it’s her mother Pooja Bedi, who would scare Alaya the most! “My mom has crazy horror stories, which she actually experienced herself, to share. So, she would narrate those stories to me. That apart she also finds new ways to scare me. Once mom pretended to have a heart attack to scare me. I mean who does that? She would also hide and jump out to scare me. Now I am used to it. I enjoy doing this to my brother. He gets scared easily. The reaction you get after you scare people is so funny,” she says.

Like her mother, Alaya too has witnessed paranormal activities herself. Remembering an instance from her New York days, Alaya said, “I was sharing an apartment with two other people there. The house was haunted, which I realised only six months after staying there. We could hear footsteps ringing and some weird sounds. We thought it was coming from a floor above us. Then we realised ki woh hamare ghar ke aandar se hi aa raha hai. We all freaked out. But then what to do when you are living in NY (on rent) you can’t just move places overnight. So, we all just dealt with living in that space. Likewise, we were shooting at an abandoned hospital in Chandigarh for (supernatural horror film) U-Turn. The property was abandoned for good 36 years and it had a very eerie vibe. The entire crew had some creepy experiences where things were falling on people and they were hearing weird sounds.”

During instances like these, Alaya takes to one mantra that her mother had shared with her. She says, “My mom taught me to just talk out loud if you feel some sort of energy around you. So, I sat one day in the living room of my haunted NY apartment, and I was like – Hi, to whoever is out there. I am living in this home for another six months and I really like this place so I appreciate it that going forward I don’t want to experience anything scary. I don’t want to be scared in my own home. And it worked! It gave me some mental peace too.”

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