Vampire stories come a dime a dozen in the West. Indian shows have rarely explored the idea, merely sticking to adaptations or reimaginations of the popular western counterparts. But writer-director Pratim Dasgupta, ahead of making Tooth Pari: When Love Bites, knew that his story had to be rooted in Indian reality. He says that the recently released Netflix series, starring Tanya Maniktala and Shantanu Maheshwari, stemmed from two ideas—a vampire falling in love with a dentist, and two parallel worlds separated by a manhole.

“The main power of a vampire is in its two canines. What if there is no dentist in the vampire community, and you have to go to a human dentist to fix it? That was one idea. Secondly, there is a restaurant in Chinatown, London, called Wong Kei. When you enter it, the waiters only ask [whether you want to sit] upstairs or downstairs, depending on the availability of tables. It was so popular that it became the restaurant’s identity. I decided to merge these two ideas,” says the director, who has several Bengali films under his belt, including Shaheb Bibi Golaam (2016) and Maacher Jhol (2017).