Viy

Walking home for summer break through the Ukrainian countryside, a seminary student needs a place to spend the night. A crotchety old woman lets him sleep in her barn, only just as he’s curled up in the hay, she reappears—horny. Nikolai Kutuzov in drag creates a wonderful witch: wearing a dirty smile that won’t take no for an answer; his furrowed gray face seems dusted in five-o’clock shadow from forehead to neckline. The student backs away: “I’m fasting,” he protests, and finally, “Grandma, you’re too old.” Being a witch, she simply takes control of his body, bends him over, and—in a coded representation of rape or who knows what—mounts him, whipping his ass with a broom as they soar into the sky. The seminarian’s prayers force a crash landing in a field, but he’s been ridden hard and put away wet by an old lady, and he’s mad. The servant of God mounts the witch and begins to club her ferociously with a log.

Juniors at Orthodox seminaries carried the title “Philosopher,” and our hero is properly called Philosopher Khoma Brut. Leonid Kuravlyov gives the Philosopher an oft-bewildered face to match his bowl cut, and the body language of a high-school jock, making it clear the hag has undermined the Philosopher’s masculinity more than his Christianity. As the seminarian thrashes away, the witch’s groans of pain transform, just as in Gogol’s tale, into “delicate little silver bells that dropped into his soul.” He does a double take and sees that lying beneath him is not the old battle-ax but a beautiful country lass.

Enter Romanian-born Natalya Varley: tightrope walker turned actress, 18 years old and already a star in the USSR. She’s the very picture of innocence: spread out doll-like on the Ukrainian heath under the breaking dawn, her porcelain-perfect features bathed in a grayish-blue somewhere between life and death. “I can’t take any more,” she sighs with the voice of an angel. Philosopher Brut hightails it back to his monastery in Kyiv, but soon word arrives that the daughter of a local country big-shot is dying, having been savagely beaten by an unknown assailant. She is calling out for Philosopher Khoma Brut.

The film’s second half takes us into the country church where the father locks the fledgling priest with his daughter’s corpse, ordering him to read scripture over it for the salvation of her soul. The body doesn’t stay put for long—even the coffin soon takes flight—leading to a phantasmagoric crescendo with Ptushko’s scampering nyechist’ (“the unclean”), beings whose job it is to raise the hanging eyelids of the Viy monster so that it may find Philosopher Brut. The intensity of Varley’s stalker-corpse is so striking that you wonder whether we’re not seeing the seeds of a future life transformation: the actress later embraced the Orthodox Church and regretted her participation in the film, self-censoring Viy out of her 2018 autobiography. She wasn’t the only one with mixed feelings—the depiction of the supernatural was troubling to historical materialists and believers alike—and this was the first and last horror movie made in the Soviet Union until the country began to fray in the ’80s.