Viy (1967)
Where to Watch: YouTube (Free) **** Nikolay Gogol is best know in the west for his scathing satirical work Dead Souls . And he did write a lot of that sort of thing. However, he was also something of a Romantic, and in Russia as elsewhere that meant fairy tales. And I do love fairy tales. I had already seen one film based on a Gogol fantasy, the utterly charming Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka , and so when I heard about Viy I was pretty excited to track it down. Thankfully, Mosfilm made that pretty easy by deciding to put a bunch of their more acclaimed films up for free on their YouTube channel. So you can now depress yourself by watching Come and See whenever you want! Thank heavens the war in the Ukraine didn't put a stop to that. The story of Viy takes place in the Ukraine (hardly surprising, since Gogol was Ukrainian). And unlike Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka , it's actually a pretty dark horror film. Of course, this is Gogol we're talking about, and so while thi...