In czarist Russia seminarist Khoma Brutus (Leonid Kuravlyov) and two of his friends are on their way home for the holidays. When night falls, the three stumble upon the farm house of an old woman (Nikolai Kutuzov), whom they beg to let them stay the night. The old woman agrees, but only if every one of the three stays in a different place. Obviously having heard strangers conditions, the young men make themselves as comfortable as possible.
Khoma's haystack in the stable soon feels a lot more crowded than he wished for. The old hag struts into his make-shift bedroom with the obvious wish for carnality. Khoma declines with a certain amount of panic. After a struggle, the witch climbs on his back and uses him like a horse. After a while, the two of them begin to fly. Only when the young man utters the name of Christ, his rider and he drop down to earth again. Khoma uses the daze the witch is in to hit her repeatedly (and a few times too often for what has happened) with a stick. After some time, the old woman suddenly transforms into a beautiful maiden (Natalya Varley).
Khoma, looking more than a little disturbed by the events, runs back to his monastery.
His ordeal is far from over, though. The next morning, his patriarch(?) orders him to say prayers at the deathbed of a noble's daughter, who has been clubbed to death and has explicitly asked for Khoma's spiritual guidance. The young man's protests are of no use, since his church will be paid good money for his work.
To ensure Khoma's complete cooperation, the noble has sent quite a few of his serfs as an escort. The men disrupt Khoma's escape attempts easily, but are not heartless. So they stop at an Inn to drink a few bottles of vodka, which probably explains why they arrive just after the girl is dead.
Now her father insists on Khoma staying for three nights of prayer in the chapel where his daughter is laid out. Again, his protests don't help the seminarist in the least, so he spends his first night in the not very welcoming chapel. The daughter is, of course, the girl the old woman changed into, dead, but neither powerless nor resting. She leaves her coffin and tries to reach Khoma and do him some kind of harm, but is repelled by his prayers and a protective circle he has drawn on the floor. As soon as the cock crows, the witch retreats into her coffin again.
All this isn't doing the young man's nerves any good. His attempts to regain his courage with vodka and boisterous talk about the fearlessness of Cossacks are of doubtful success.
The second night is even worse: Now his tormentor flies around in her coffin and tries to smash the invisible barrier that separates her from her victim. Without much more success than whittling Khoma's courage down even more and turning his hair white, but we all know that these kind of things are always decided in the third night.
Life as a movie geek is an interesting one. Some day I'm expertly babbling about the aesthetics of Jess Franco's work, another day I am writing up a film like Viy, about whose context I know next to nothing. Not that this has ever stopped me. At least I am somewhat familiar with the Nikolai Gogol tale the film is based on, or the Nikolai Gogol tale this film is fighting against, I should say. Both pretend to be simple folk tales, but have quite different agendas. Gogol's story propagates an uncomfortable marriage of russian-orthodox piety and the idealization of Cossack values with the Cossacks as a kind of Herrenrasse that makes some of his works hard to stomach for people who don't think raping and pillaging are worthwhile accomplishments.
Viy the film uses the same basic plot and the same folkloric feel to show both Christianity and "Cossackness" as crutches that won't help anyone in the end to gain more than the kind of bluster one will also get through vodka. In this way, the film has both a message conforming to communist party line and a very Russian feeling fatalism that is very far away from any party lines at all.
All this could probably end up interesting in theory, but very dull in practice. The film's two directors (probably with a lot of help of their writer/art director/special effects guy Aleksandr Ptushko, who somehow managed to specialize in fantastic cinema in a climate that demanded naturalism and nothing else) manage to make their film come alive as a piece of folklore taking place in the life of real people, living in a believable place and time. Of much help here is the warm and laconic sense of humor that runs through the film, fittingly exactly the kind of humor I would expect from people living in as terrible a moment in history as czarist Russia was.
When the fantastic enters this world, it does so as a matter of course, that can't be questioned.
The special effects are of course not "realistic" in a modern sense at all, they are instead driven by inventiveness and an assured sense for the grotesque. The final ten minutes of the film may not be frightening for a modern audience, but they sure as hell show some sights I will never forget.
This must be what the reviewers of classy films call a masterpiece.
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