More Than the Only Soviet Horror Film: Stop-Motion Witches, Ukrainian Nationalism, Gogol and Green-Screens in Viy, at BAM
In the late 1960s, as directors like Sergei Parajanov and Iuri Illienko were causing a stir in the film industry with their new approach to national cinema, a slightly more commercial project was making waves within the Soviet Union. It was then that Mosfilm Studios released Viy, its first ever horror film, a gothic ghost story that follows a young Ukrainian seminarian as he stands vigil over the body of the witch who tried to kill him. Over the course of three nights, the seminarian is driven to exhaustion by the witch’s attempts to escape her tomb, until he finally dies of fright when confronted by the Viy, the king of the goblins. Despite its tremendous domestic success—the film had an estimated 32.6 million viewers the year it was released—Viy never broke through to international audiences, leaving it as more the answer to a trivia question (“What was the only horror film made under the Soviet Union?”) than a part of the international horror cannon.
As such, the impact of the film is surprisingly varied. Those interested in Viy only as an exotic horror film about witches will not be disappointed: Ptushko and his crew make almost no changes to the script from Gogol’s short story, and as a result, the film acts as a perfect synthesis of Gogol’s dark sense of humor and Ptushko’s talent for practical effects. Each of the three nights that Khoma spends in vigil over the undead witch is a charming mixture of set design and practical effects. When the witch appeals to the goblin king in particular, all manner of demons crawl from every hole and window in the old church, only to be caught in the dawning light as they try to flee back to their graves. Granted, the results aren’t always particularly frightening; Russian film historian Josephine Woll referred to Viy as a movie that should only “marginally be counted as a horror film,” and the passage of time has done no favors to Viy’s repeated green screen flying sequences. Still, Viy is no low-budget nightmare and will appeal to anyone with a love of the genre and a dislike of those who laugh at older films.
In this way, Viy serves as the prototypical horror film of the 1960s, one whose special effects and lowbrow exterior disguise its own considerably more nuanced agenda. A year after Viy was released in theaters, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby changed the horror genre forever; the Russian horror genre, meanwhile, would disappear again until the fall of the Soviet Union. While countless words have been spent praising filmmakers such as Miklós Jancsó and Sergei Parajanov on their subversive approach to filmmaking under the watchful eye of the Soviet Union—and rightfully so—it is a campy little film about witches and goblins released under the Soviet Union’s own banner and seen by millions that may have struck the strongest blow against Russian imperialism.