Genre enthusiasts will often champion Britain’s Hammer Films as the end-all-be-all of ’60s horror. After viewing Communist Russia’s Viy, however, I think it might be high time we start holding these hammer-and-sickle films up just a little be higher. Don’t tell Joseph McCarthy!
Sometime in the 19th century, a total jerk of a seminary student is attacked by a witch in the countryside; she actually climbs on his shoulders piggyback-style and rides him around the Earth. When they finally land in the soft grass, he gives her a few rights and lefts to the face, killing her instantly; it’s then revealed that she’s actually a beautiful local girl.
In deep borscht now, he’s forced to spend three nights praying with her corpse in a church. The first two nights, though rather spooky with her corpse flying around and such, is mostly all right because he has a protective chalk circle around him, creating a protective barrier. But that third night, the student — drunk out of his gourd, mind you — faces a bizarre cavalcade of diabolical imps, crawling ghouls and a globular blob that needs help from the emaciated zombies to lift his goopy eyelids up.
Viy is a well-done politburo of irreligious terror that, especially when viewed against the anti-Russian propaganda we Americans have been brainwashed with regarding Communism, it is surprisingly ahead of its time, filling the screen with more demonic imagination and unsettling imagery than most of the Western horror flicks that never made it past the Iron Curtain. —Louis Fowler