Viy: The Soviet Folk-Horror Fever Dream

The Soviet Union did not make horror films. There was no market logic that produced them, no exploitation sector to supply them, and a cultural apparatus that regarded the genre as a symptom of Western decadence and religious hangover. Then in 1967 Mosfilm released Viy, a seventy-seven-minute picture in which a drunk seminary student is locked in a church with a dead witch for three nights, draws a chalk circle around himself, and is eventually torn apart by demons summoned through the floor. It remains, more or less, the only one.

The film exists because of Nikolai Gogol. His 1835 novella, from the Mirgorod collection, is canonical Russian literature, and canonical literature could be adapted. A screenplay that arrived proposing an original story about a soul-devouring monster would have died in a committee. A screenplay that arrived proposing Gogol had the strongest possible defence: the state had already decided this was art. Viy got made because it had a passport.

The pupil and the witch

Khoma Brut is a philosophy student at a Kyiv seminary, which in Gogol’s hands means a man whose main disciplines are drinking, eating and avoiding effort. Leonid Kuravlyov plays him with a wonderful, unheroic self-interest — this is a protagonist whose first instinct in every crisis is to leave, and whose second is to have a drink about it. He is on holiday. He gets lost. He and two companions beg a night’s shelter at a remote farm, and an old woman puts him in the barn.

She comes to him in the dark, climbs on his back, and rides him into the air. Khoma beats her with a length of wood until she stops, and the old woman becomes a beautiful young one. He runs.

Then he is summoned. A wealthy Cossack captain’s daughter has been found beaten and dying, and her last request was that a seminarian named Khoma Brut should read the prayers over her body for three nights in the estate church. The seminary rector sends him. The Cossacks escort him. The film’s engine is that every institution in Khoma’s life — the church, the aristocracy, the armed men at the door — cooperates to deliver him to the thing that wants him, and each of them thinks it is doing something perfectly ordinary.

This is the folk-horror frame in full working order, arriving from a direction nobody in Britain was looking. The outsider who has done something in the dark; the community that receives him with total correctness; the ritual with a date on it. British cinema would build The Wicker Man on this six years later. Gogol had it in 1835.

Three nights and a piece of chalk

The church sequences are the film, and their construction is close to perfect. Khoma is locked in at dusk with a coffin, a candle, a prayer book and a stick of chalk. He draws a circle around himself, and the circle holds.

That is a superb piece of dramatic geometry, because it converts an entire horror film into a game with one rule. The audience learns the rule immediately and then spends three nights watching the threat probe it. Night one, the corpse sits up. Night two, she walks, and the coffin flies. Night three, the church itself begins delivering hands and faces through the walls. The circle never fails. The escalation is entirely in what the film puts outside it, and Khoma’s terror is entirely about whether his nerve will fail before his chalk does.

The three-night structure gives the directors, Konstantin Yershov and Georgiy Kropachyov, a rhythm most horror films would kill for: a reset, a repetition, an increase. Between nights, Khoma is let out into daylight, gets catastrophically drunk, tries to run, and is dragged back. The comedy of the day scenes is what makes the night scenes work. A film that stayed in the church would be exhausting. A film that keeps letting its hero out to fail at escaping is a trap closing.

Ptushko’s hands

Aleksandr Ptushko oversaw the production design and the effects, and his fingerprints are the reason the film looks like nothing else. Ptushko had been making Soviet fantasy since the 1930s — The New Gulliver, Sadko, Ilya Muromets — with a stop-motion and in-camera repertoire developed in near-total isolation from Hollywood technique. He was, by 1967, the USSR’s answer to a question nobody in the USSR had asked.

His demons are handmade in a way that has aged into something better than realism. The coffin flies on wires, visibly, in a wide shot, circling the church interior with Natalya Varley lying in it — Varley was circus-trained, which is why the production could put her up there at all, and the physical fact of a real object in real space swinging over real floorboards is worth more than any later effect. The hands that come through the church walls are hands, pushed through a set. The Viy itself is a costume, and it moves like a costume, with the ponderous inevitability of something heavy being carried.

The wrongness this produces is specific. Because everything is physically present, the images have the logic of a dream rather than an effect — there is no seam to find, because the thing was actually in front of the lens looking absurd, and absurd is precisely what a folk demon should look like. The argument for handmade horror is made at length in What latex knows that pixels don’t, and Viy is one of its better exhibits.

Varley’s own contribution has been undersold for decades. She was nineteen or so, and she plays the pannochka with an unblinking stillness in the coffin and a genuine malice when she moves. Her voice was replaced in post by Klara Rumyanova, standard Soviet practice, and the dub is the one element of the film that feels imposed.

The joke Gogol wrote

The thing most Western write-ups get wrong is the tone. Viy is funny. Gogol’s story is a comedy about a greedy, cowardly student, and the film keeps the comedy intact — the seminarians stealing food, the Cossacks arguing about theology while drunk, Khoma dancing himself into a stupor. The horror is real and it sits directly alongside the farce with no transition scene between them.

This is why it feels so unstable to a modern viewer trained on tonally sealed horror. The film moves from a genuinely frightening night in a church to a broad joke about a hangover in a single cut, and the whiplash is the point: Khoma keeps trying to laugh the thing off, and the film keeps letting him, and the laughing is what kills him. Compare Bava’s Black Sunday, which took its credit from the same Gogol novella seven years earlier and threw away everything except the witch. Bava made a sombre Moldavian revenge tragedy. Viy is what the source actually is, and the source is stranger.

The Eastern European relative worth chasing is Czech: Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, from 1970, which shares the conviction that folklore is best filmed as delirium with no apology for its own logic.

Where to watch: a clean transfer with the original Russian audio and decent subtitles. The film has circulated for years in grey-market copies with dubs and cuts that flatten the comedy and turn Ptushko’s colour into mud.

Spoilers below

The witch is the captain’s daughter, and Khoma’s beating in the barn is what killed her. The film establishes this without ceremony, and its consequence is that the three nights are a punishment Khoma has earned. He is reading prayers over a woman he murdered, and he knows it, and everyone forcing him to do it does not.

The first two nights, the circle holds against her directly. She rises, she gropes for him, she cannot find him — the chalk makes him invisible rather than merely untouchable, which is a distinction the film uses beautifully, since she passes within inches and looks straight through him. On the third night she stops trying herself and summons help. The church floods with demons, and they cannot find him either.

So she calls the Viy. It is brought in by the others, an earth-coloured thing with eyelids hanging to the ground, and it says: lift my eyelids. Its servants raise them with pitchforks. It looks around, finds Khoma, and points, and the instant the finger comes up the circle is worthless and everything in the room can see him.

Khoma dies of terror on the spot. Then the cock crows, and the demons scramble for the windows and fail to get out, and they are left there, stuck in the walls of a church at sunrise. The final shot is the abandoned church years on, grown over, with the things still in it.

The last scene belongs to Khoma’s two friends, who conclude over a drink that he perished because he was afraid, and that a man who was not afraid would have been fine. It is a stupid, comfortable, entirely human explanation, offered by two men who were not there, and Gogol’s joke — that the survivors will always find a reason it could not happen to them — is the coldest thing in the film.