Viy (1967)
Viy (1967) is a strange and almost solitary object in Soviet cinema: a horror film, an actual horror film with monsters and demons and supernatural set-pieces, in a national cinema that mostly didn’t make horror at all. Officially endorsed by Mosfilm and based on a Nikolai Gogol folktale, it was both safely “classical” enough to be allowed and weird enough that you can feel its makers smuggling something foreign through state-approved walls. Watching it now, decades after the country that produced it ceased to exist, is to encounter a film at war with itself: a propagandist’s idea of folklore, a folklorist’s idea of theology, and a folk artist’s idea of a Hollywood spectacle, all squashed into 77 minutes of monastic chant and creeping unease.
Co-directed by Georgi Kropachyov and Konstantin Ershov (with significant uncredited contribution from the legendary effects pioneer Aleksandr Ptushko, who designed the final sequence) Viy is a film that punches well above its weight in terms of imagination. The Soviet film industry in 1967 was a state apparatus (slow, hierarchical, conservative) but it was also enormous, and quietly capable of producing one-off oddities like this one. It belongs in conversation with the poetic-philosophical strand of Soviet cinema that emerged in the same decade, works like The Color of Pomegranates that didn’t oppose the system head-on but operated at oblique angles to it, using folklore, ritual, and visual ornament to say things the political apparatus didn’t quite have the vocabulary to censor. The Soviet Union (a country, like its films, that no longer exists) produced Earth in 1930 and Stalker twelve years after this; Viy belongs somewhere on that strange road between them, less ambitious than either but no less peculiar.
Leonid Kuravlyov plays Khoma Brut, the seminarian dispatched to read the rites over a beautiful young woman whose death turns out to be the start of something. Kuravlyov is good, equal parts smug clergy and panicked human, and Natalya Varley, as the witch in her dual form, manages to be both genuinely beautiful and properly unsettling, no small feat in a film with this much fog and chant. The supporting cast plays archetypes (the centurion, the freebie, the witch) which is what folklore demands. The real lead, though, is the church set itself: a single small interior that, in the third act, becomes a stage for one of the most visually inventive sequences in Soviet cinema.
The finale is genuinely wild: a whirlwind of spectral apparitions, demonic creatures, and escalating terror that builds to a climax both visually inventive and genuinely unsettling. The reveal of Viy is iconic, and the last 15 minutes deliver the kind of folk-horror payoff that feels ahead of its era, prefiguring later works like The Witch.
But getting there is a test of patience. The first two acts unfold with deliberate, almost liturgical slowness: long stretches of chanting, walking, and atmospheric setup that prioritize mood over momentum. While clearly intentional (to evoke ritual and dread) the pacing can feel methodical to the point of stagnation, especially for viewers accustomed to more propulsive horror. The performances are earnest but restrained, and the dialogue-heavy early scenes lack the visual dynamism that makes the finale so effective.
There’s a real argument that Viy is the unacknowledged grandparent of modern folk horror. Long before Carnival of Souls had stopped echoing, and decades before The Witch or Midsommar revived the genre for the festival circuit, Soviet animators and effects designers in a Moscow studio were already building a vocabulary of monastic dread, witchy doubling, and creature-feature payoff. The fact that the film hides its ambition behind 60 minutes of ritualised setup is part of its identity, not a flaw to be edited around. Whether you enjoy that ritualised setup depends largely on what you’re willing to give to a film. Viy is historically important, visually inventive in bursts, and undeniably influential, but it’s also a slow burn that doesn’t always reward the wait. If you can embrace its ritualistic rhythm, the payoff is worth it. But if you’re looking for consistent tension or narrative drive, you may find yourself admiring it more than enjoying it. A fascinating curio, not a timeless classic.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1967 | Watched: 2026-05-19
