When you’re talking obscure horror movies you’ve got to know your audience.  Mention a movie that the general public might consider obscure – say John Hancock’s eerie LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (1971) or Dario Argento’s immortal SUSPIRIA (1977) – and you’re likely to elicit a groan from a true horror aficionado.  This isn’t snobbery per se but something closer kin to the 1,000 yard stare of combat-hardened veterans of war.  A horror lifer doesn’t just yank one of the ubiquitous Horror Films To Die For from the New Releases rack come Friday and think him or herself a horror maven because he’s watched some poor sap have his scrotum staplegunned to the seat of a chair; the true horrorite has put in the leg work and laid out the cash to buy the films they’re interested in – in every possible media known to man.  A lot of us have history with these so-called obscure horror movies… we’ve either seen them theatrically, in their original release (as I did the above two titles) or followed their trail from 16mm to gray market VHS to studio released tape to DVD upgrade (been there, bought that) to Blu-ray and beyond.  So we tend to be an exacting lot, especially when the O Word is being passed around, because for all our faults – and they are legion – we know from obscure. 

When Morlock Jeff pitched a Halloween-themed blog-a-thon in which we could all write about our favorite obscure horror movies, I ran a lot of prospective titles in front of my eyes before settling on one that I truly believe 90% of those reading these words will not have seen.  And yet even as I set about telling you about VIY (1967), I know somewhere in the world there’s a fat guy in a black SADIST OF NOTRE DAME tee shirt rolling his eyes and groaning “Oh, that old thing?”  Well, anyway.  Based on a short story of the same name by Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, VIY (pronounced “vee-yuh”) is a blackly comic horror fairy tale, combining live action, stop motion animation, charmingly crude cinematic processes and some good old theatrical stage craft to tell the story of a young seminarian who is given the unenviable task of praying over the body of a Cossack’s dead daughter.  Our protagonist, Khoma Brut (Leonid Kuravlyov), a shiftless student of philosophy at Kiev’s Bratsky Monastery, comes to this assignment after he has been assailed by a witch (creepy Nikolai Kutuzov) while on a holiday break from his studies.  Enchanted by the old crone and made to bear her as if he were a mere pack horse, Khoma is horrified when both he and the hag take flight above the countryside.  Shouting out enough scripture to break the witch’s hold on him, the pair crash to the earth, where Khoma beats the old woman with her own broomstick and is horrified to see her transform into a beautiful young woman (Natalya Varley).  I’ll bet you rubles to babushkas you can guess who the Cossack’s dead daughter turns out to be.

Traveling with great reluctance to the Cossack’s compound, Khoma has little choice but to be locked inside a dilapidated chapel, where over the course of three long nights he prays for the soul of the Dead Girl as she rises restlessly from her coffin to taunt and torment him.  Khoma Brut’s exhaustive attempts to save the girl’s soul (which is to say to keep her from exacting a terrible revenge upon him for killing her) will have an almost archetypal resonance for the horror fan.  With her pale skin and raven black hair, the Dead Girl could be the evil twin of Snow White or half a dozen other fairytale heroines and Khoma’s desperate battle against her is right up there with the third acts of THE EXORCIST (1973) and THE EVIL DEAD (1981), in which a man or men lock themselves in with a girl or woman possessed of some sort of evil with the hope of beating it out of her … and making it out alive.  Mario Bava based his feature film debut, BLACK SUNDAY ( LA MASCHERA DEL DEMONIA, 1960) on the Gogol story, which exists in the finished film only as a flavoring… and yet there is Barbara Steele as the vampiric seductress Princess Asa, lying bloodless in her coffin, ancient, undying, and pretty as Hell.  To protect himself from the girl, Khoma draws a chalk circle on the floor of the old chapel, rendering himself invisible to the she-creature, who reaches out with her claw-like hands to find him.  You’ll recognize the old chalk circle bit from a number of horror films, among them Hammer’s THE DEVIL RIDES OUT (US: THE DEVIL’S BRIDE, 1968), THE NORLISS TAPES (1973) and THE SKELETON KEY (2005).  The device works and Khoma survives… the first night, anyway.

Of course, it’s a whole new ball game on the second night, during which the Dead Girl surfs around the inside perimeter of the chapel, buzzing Khoma Brut like a Messerschmidt while he salts the air with prayers.  As the cock crows the following morning, Khoma’s hair has turned white.  He takes some repast with the Cossack’s men, sings and dances drunkenly, for he knows that the third night will be the last.  Directed for Mosfilm by former production designer Georgi Kropachyov and actor-writer Konstantin Yershov, VIY bears the unmistakable stamp of the Soviet Union’s premiere fantasist, Aleksandr Ptushko, who served (at least officially) as this film’s production designer and shares the writing credit as well.  Kropachyov and Yershov never had significant directing careers, while VIY sits comfortably (and logically) in Ptushko’s long and dynamic resume of fantasy films, alongside SADKO (US: THE MAGIC VOYAGE OF SINBAD, 1953), ILYA MUROMETS (THE SWORD AND THE DRAGON, 1956) and RUSLAN AND LUDMILLA (RUSLAN I LYUDMILLA, 1972), which Ptushko completed in the year before his death.  Often called “the Walt Disney of the Soviet Union,” it is Ptushko’s hand one feels in VIY‘s best scenes: Koma’s horsey cashiering by the witch, his battles with the Dead Girl, and the final confrontation, in which all the demons of the underworld rise to the occasion.

VIY is just a whole lot of fun.  It’s irreverently, laugh-out-loud funny, it’s charmingly archaic (the witch’s pig-a-back ride is accomplished via a Max Fleischer-style stereoptic process, with the actors running in place in front of a filmed rotating background, which gives the scene a three dimensional aspect right out of Merrie Melodies), it’s well acted by a troupe of great-looking Soviet performers (those Cossack faces are right out of a Sam Peckinpah western) and it’s also creepy as all get-out.  Even if the rational, buzz-killing part of your brain can say “Oh, that’s just a hand puppet” or “Oh, that’s just a dwarf,” the cumulative effect of all these images is genuinely unsettling.  The best part of all, and particularly needful at Halloween, is the sense one gets of being taken away to another place and time where all bets are off and anything can happen.  Many years ago, I had the privilege of helping a friend inaugurate his brand new high-def widescreen, bigger-than-life TV by showing him a double feature of VIY and the Chinese hopping vampire movie MR. VAMPIRE (GEUNG SI SIN SANG, 1985), about which our friend Keelsetter wrote in June of 2008.  It was a great three hours or so of aerobic evil-busting and appreciative belly laughs.  What more could you want for Halloween?

A final thought about our Dead Girl, Natalya Varley, who transitions so winningly in VIY from sun-kissed winsomeness to teeth-baring, demon summoning hellion.  The Dead Girl’s rise from her coffin on the first night, which the camera captures from behind (as above) plays like a reverse angle on the descent of the bat-winged Luna in Tod Browning’s MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935), about which I wrote a couple of weeks ago.  If not the mother of all creepy horror movie girls, Varley’s character is certainly qualified to be their big sister.  Speaking of LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH, the characters played by Mariclare Costello (“Emily”) and Gretchen Corbett (“The Girl”) both feel as though they might have been inspired by isolated qualities of Varley’s  vengeful haint, as does Linda Blair’s Regan MacNeil in THE EXORCIST and Sissy Spacek’s CARRIE (1976).  And what is Sadako from the Japanese RING (1996) and its sequels and knock-offs but Gogol’s Dead Girl on a particularly bad hair day?  Ditto the pop-up spooks of THE GRUDGE films.  I’m not making the claim that all these popular spookshow troupers were inspired by Gogol or Mosfilm’s adaptation of VIY – these figures are firmly rooted in the folklore of their countries of origin – but that’s the best thing about being a horror aficionado… appreciating the boundless wellspring of primal fear that has trickled up into our respective and collective imaginations to serve as the stuff that nightmares are made on.

A final, personal note.  So attached am I to Gogol’s story and the 1967 film from the Soviet Union that I adapted VIY as a stage play in 2002 and produced and directed a production in New York in the spring of 2004.  That’s Jeremy Schwartz on the left as Khoma Brut and Michelle Maryk on the right as the Dead Girl, headlining a cast of 15 actors who changed parts throughout, bringing to life the Bratsky Monastery, the Kiev countryside, the old chapel and the bowels of Hell on a mostly empty stage, with a minimum of props.  Of course, being a horror lifer, I couldn’t help but to work in references to other fright films and gave my Dead Girl a white ball to bounce, just like the vengeful poppet Melissa Grapps from Mario Bava’s KILL, BABY… KILL (OPERAZIONE PAURA, 1966).  Getting to enact these moments onstage for an appreciative audience really was a dream come true.