Scrooge
Like the old cuss himself, Scrooge (1951) is a mix of the sentimental and the horrific.
Captain Volkonogov Escaped
Leningrad, 1938. The Stalinist purges are in full swing, and the secret police have set up shop in an appropriated Tsarist-era palace, all gold leaf and chandeliers, its parquet floors spread thick with hay to soak up the blood from tortured confessions.
The Awakening
I recently visited Queen Hatshepsut, the model for the mummy in The Awakening and the novel it’s based on: Bram Stoker’s wild horror/fantasy The Jewel of Seven Stars.
Viy
In 1966, two Moscow film students pitched a horror feature based on a classic Slavic witch tale, Nikolai Gogol’s Viy (1833). The khudsovety (artistic committees) that evaluated film proposals in the USSR scowled at the genre as catering to base instincts and superstition.