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VIY

Based on the same Gogol story that inspired Mario Bava’s 1960 Black Sunday, but so different from Bava’s movie that the kinship between them is almost unrecognizable, the bizarre 1967 Soviet film Viy is about a young seminarian who, while traveling at night, runs afoul of a witch. Then he’s summoned to the house of a local landowner to say prayers for the man’s dead daughter. Obliged to spend three successive nights beside the corpse, the seminarian is terrorized by the undead woman, her flying coffin, and other manifestations.

The simple, repetitive narrative of Viy and its ready immersion in a world of superstition and magic link the film to folklore rather than to the gothic novel, so that its mood is radically different from that of most Western horror films. The visual effects, which bear the stamp of supervising director Aleksandr Ptushko (the film was directed by two of his students, Georgii Kropachev and Konstantin Ershov), are striking: the climactic scenes in a church are a holocaust of ultra-wide angles, camera spins, and various creepy-crawlies. Both quaint and ferocious, Viy is a one-of-a-kind imaginative work. In Russian with English subtitles. (78 minutes)

BY CHRIS FUJIWARA

Issue Date: October 24 - October 31, 2002
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