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 things head to some fairly bleak places by the end of the film, much of the story is shot through with sharp humour and biting social commentary. Take our protagonist - a drunken, philandering seminary student and self-style philosopher by the name of Khoma Brute. The story opens with all the seminarians being released for school holidays from a seminary in Kiev. Khoma and two of his friends set off on foot for their home town, but get lost in the dark and wind-up stumbling upon a farm. The only person living their is a truly frightful looking old woman (played by a male actor in drag), who only agrees to let the trio stay the night if they'll agree to sleep in different parts of the house. Now, it soon becomes apparent that this is all part of the old woman's scheme to put the moves on Khoma, easily the most attractive of the three young men. When he understandably rebuffs her advances, however, he finds himself in pretty hot water. The old woman is a witch! She leaps on Khoma's shoulders and hag rides him through the night sky. He manages to bring her down to earth by quoting the scripture, and immediately upon landing beats her with a stick. Maybe not what I'd do, but then I've never been sexually assaulted and then temporarily possessed by a witch.

You might think that's the end of Khoma's troubles, but no. The old woman transforms before his eyes into a beautiful young woman. Understandably scared shitless, Khoma bolts. He makes it back to the seminary on foot, only to find that he is so shit out of luck he makes Albert King look like Madonna. A nearby nobleman has a young daughter, you see, and someone beat her to within an inch of her life. She was able to make one final request before she slipped away, though - that Khoma come to her home and read the scripture over her for three consecutive nights. What's worse, the nobleman sends a bunch of heavies to make sure Khoma couldn't possibly back out on his daughter's dying wish.

Now, obviously the daughter is the witch. And obviously she had an ulterior motive in summoning Khoma. But discovering just what happens and why is a large part of the fun of this film. The tone of the film for much of its running time walks a fine line between a queasy sort of humour and genuinely disturbing. There's also a deliberate ambiguity both about what the drunken Khoma actually sees and what he hallucinates, until things reach such a devastating climax that ultimately it doesn't matter one way or another. That's really one of my favourite kinds of story - one with an unreliable POV character who at the same time inhabits a world where reality is constantly on the verge of breaking down. The three nights Khoma spends in the church praying over the witch are the stuff of nightmares, with the last night in particular the sort of phantasmagorical freakout that still stands as fucking brilliant today, and which will probably stay with most viewers for the rest of their lives. Meanwhile, Khoma's daytime interactions with the people of the nobleman's estate slowly built up a picture of a deeply wrong place where everyone knows something profoundly, even supernaturally, fucked up has been going on, but refuses to actually do anything about it because the muzhiks are all blindly devoted to their lord. 

That last point hits on something I find interesting about the film that I haven't seen many people remark upon. I really think Viy is a political film, and what's especially interesting is that it's a political supernatural horror film featuring a novice priest as the protagonist made in Soviet Russia. A novice priest who is both a professed intellectual and wantonly profligate. He's also a Cossack, and if I remember my grade elven history correctly, those guys were never much popular with the proletariat. So basically we have a film about someone who twenty years earlier would have been decried as an enemy of the state, as the fucking hero. This plays into the main themes of the film. Firstly, that Khoma is fundamentally unsuited to be the spiritual shepherd of any flock; and secondly, that the power of the church is ultimately shown to be pretty much bullshit. I don't want to spoil the ending, but it's a doozy.

I don't know that I can really recommend Viy enough. It's not a perfect film, but it's a visually gorgeous and highly imaginative one. The special effects are of the simplest kind, but executed so well that they hold up even today. The escalation of the vigils over the witch is great, as Khoma goes from "That wasn't so bad - I've got this" to "Jesus please don't make me go back into that fucking church". Things get very dark, but there are also plenty of humorous moments and several memorably uncanny scenes (I don't want to spoil them, the moment when the witch turns into the young noblewoman is exactly the right mixture of haunting and beautiful, for example). And the fact that Khoma suffers torment at the hands of a beautiful young woman throws a lot of the conventions of your typical horror film on their head. It really is a great movie - the sort of well rounded cinematic experience that manages to weave together a host of contradictory ideas and tones into a truly hallucinatory experience. I'm quite fond of films that operate on dream logic, and I really think Viy is one of the best of its type that I've seen.