Soviet Film Wednesday: Viy

A frightened seminary student stands alone inside a dark village church. A corpse lies before him. He draws a protective circle around himself and begins to pray, knowing that when night falls the dead young woman may rise from her coffin again. With each passing night, the supernatural attacks grow stranger, the church becomes less connected to the ordinary world outside, and the frightened student moves closer to an encounter with something even the witch herself seems to fear.

Released in 1967, Viy is one of the strangest and most memorable films to emerge from Soviet cinema. Directed by Konstantin Yershov and Georgiy Kropachyov, with fantasy filmmaker Aleksandr Ptushko serving as screenwriter, artistic supervisor, and a major force behind the special effects, the film adapts Nikolai Gogol’s 1835 novella of the same name. Leonid Kuravlyov stars as the unfortunate philosophy student Khoma Brut, while Natalya Varley plays the mysterious young woman whose death sends him into three increasingly terrifying nights of supernatural chaos.

Viy is commonly described as the first Soviet horror feature, although that label inevitably simplifies a film culture in which supernatural, Gothic, and frightening imagery had appeared in other forms. Even Mosfilm describes it as the first Soviet horror film, while the British Film Institute has called it the first—and, by some interpretations, essentially the only—full-fledged horror film produced during the Soviet era.

Whatever category we give it, Viy remains wonderfully difficult to classify. It is horror, dark comedy, folklore, fantasy, literary adaptation, religious nightmare, and special-effects spectacle all at once. More than half a century later, its handmade monsters, flying coffin, warped perspectives, painted sets, and feverish final night still give it an atmosphere unlike almost anything else in cinema.

📚 Nikolai Gogol’s Viy

The film is based on Nikolai Gogol’s novella Viy, first published in 1835 as part of his collection Mirgorod. Gogol was born in what is now Ukraine and drew extensively upon Ukrainian settings, oral traditions, folk beliefs, religious imagery, village customs, and supernatural tales throughout his early writing.

Viy belongs to that world.

The story begins among students at a theological seminary in Kyiv before moving into the Ukrainian countryside, where the everyday and supernatural coexist with remarkable ease. Witches may appear beside farmhouses, demons invade sacred spaces, and villagers discuss impossible events with the matter-of-fact seriousness normally reserved for weather or livestock.

Gogol’s mixture of horror and comedy is essential. His world is not solemn Gothic terror from beginning to end. Characters drink, argue, complain, boast, sleep, steal food, make jokes, and behave foolishly even while something genuinely frightening waits nearby.

The 1967 film preserves much of that strange tonal balance.

👁️ What Exactly Is Viy?

The title suggests that Viy will dominate the story, but the creature appears only near the climax.

Gogol described Viy as a terrifying underground or chthonic being with extraordinarily heavy eyelids that hang toward the ground. He cannot easily lift them himself, and lesser creatures must help raise them. Once his eyes are exposed, however, his gaze can locate what supernatural forces have been unable to see.

The folkloric origins of Viy have been debated for generations. Gogol presented the story as though he were passing along a genuine popular legend, but some scholars have argued that the specific creature called Viy was largely or entirely Gogol’s invention.

Other researchers have pointed to related beings in Ukrainian and wider Slavic folklore, particularly supernatural figures whose enormous eyelids or eyebrows must be physically lifted before they can unleash a destructive gaze. More recent folklore scholarship has continued examining these parallels.

That uncertainty actually suits the character.

Viy feels ancient even when his precise ancestry remains difficult to pin down.

🎓 Meet Khoma Brut

The unfortunate hero of Viy is Khoma Brut, a philosophy student at a theological seminary in Kyiv.

Leonid Kuravlyov plays him not as an idealized man of faith but as an extremely human one. Khoma enjoys food and drink, tries to avoid trouble, becomes frightened easily, and possesses nowhere near the unwavering spiritual discipline that might be expected of the hero in a conventional religious tale.

This makes him much more interesting.

He knows the forms of prayer.

He understands the language of religion.

He can draw a sacred circle around himself.

Yet knowledge and faith are not necessarily the same thing.

The entire film eventually tests what happens when someone who understands religious ritual intellectually is confronted with evil that suddenly becomes physically real.

🌾 Three Seminarians on the Road

The story begins lightly.

Khoma and two fellow seminarians have been released from their studies and are traveling through the countryside. As darkness approaches, they search for somewhere to sleep and eventually arrive at an isolated farmstead inhabited by an old woman.

The tone initially feels closer to rustic comedy than horror.

The travelers are hungry.

They complain.

They negotiate sleeping arrangements.

Nothing about the situation seems especially threatening.

That changes when the old woman approaches Khoma during the night.

What follows is one of the film’s most surreal early sequences.

🧙 The Witch

The apparently frail old woman suddenly possesses enormous supernatural strength.

She climbs onto Khoma’s back and forces him to carry her.

Then they rise from the earth.

Khoma and the witch fly across the countryside beneath the night sky while the landscape seems to move beneath them in an impossible dream.

The sequence immediately announces that Viy is not interested in realistic horror.

Its supernatural world is theatrical, folkloric, artificial, and intentionally strange.

Khoma eventually manages to break the witch’s spell. Once they return to the ground, he beats her in terror and desperation.

Then another transformation occurs.

The old woman becomes a beautiful young woman.

Khoma flees.

⚰️ A Dying Woman’s Final Request

Back at the seminary, Khoma hopes to forget what happened.

He does not get the chance.

A wealthy Cossack centurion’s daughter is dying, and before her death she has made a peculiar request: a particular seminary student named Khoma Brut must come to pray for her soul.

Khoma has no idea how she could know his name.

The viewer does.

When he is taken to the centurion’s home and sees the dead young woman, he recognizes her as the beautiful figure into whom the witch transformed.

The father wants to know how his daughter knew Khoma.

Khoma wants nothing more than to leave.

Neither gets a satisfactory answer.

Instead, the centurion orders Khoma to spend three nights alone beside his daughter’s coffin in the village church, reading prayers over her body.

⛪ The Church

Much of Viy‘s lasting power comes from its church set.

During daylight, the old wooden church appears neglected and strange but still physically understandable. It contains religious paintings, candles, wooden surfaces, icons, doors, and recognizable architecture.

At night it becomes another world.

Shadows deepen.

Painted figures seem to watch.

Walls appear less stable.

Corners seem impossibly dark.

The familiar religious space gradually becomes the setting for supernatural invasion.

This is one of the film’s most unsettling ideas.

Khoma is not being attacked in a forest, ruined castle, or graveyard.

He is inside a church.

The place that should offer the greatest protection becomes the location in which everything outside ordinary reality gathers around him.

🕯️ The First Night

Khoma begins the first vigil nervous but still hopeful that he can simply complete the prayers and leave.

Then the dead woman sits up.

Natalya Varley’s transformation from motionless corpse to supernatural predator is wonderfully controlled. She does not need elaborate dialogue or realistic makeup to become frightening. Her stillness is part of what makes the sequence work.

The pannochka rises from her coffin and begins searching for Khoma.

He responds by drawing a protective circle on the floor and praying.

The circle works.

She cannot see him.

She moves around the church attempting to locate the person she knows must be nearby, but some invisible boundary keeps Khoma hidden and protected.

For the moment, ritual is stronger than the witch.

⚰️ The Flying Coffin

Then the film abandons restraint.

The coffin itself begins flying around the church.

It crashes through the air as the witch attempts to reach Khoma inside his sacred circle. The sequence is frightening, absurd, theatrical, and exhilarating all at once.

A modern horror film might attempt to make the effect invisible through digital realism.

Viy does something more enjoyable.

The effect looks physical because it is physical.

Objects move through real space.

Actors react to practical mechanisms.

Wires, rigs, sets, camera tricks, and optical effects create an impossible event inside a tangible environment.

The illusion never completely hides the filmmaking.

That is part of its charm.

🌅 Dawn Saves Him

Morning arrives before the witch can reach Khoma.

The supernatural assault abruptly ends.

The church becomes an ordinary structure again.

Khoma survives.

Yet the escape provides very little comfort because he knows he must return the following night.

This repeated structure gives Viy an almost fairy-tale rhythm.

Day offers temporary safety.

Night removes it.

Each sunrise resets the world.

Each sunset allows the impossible to return.

The repetition also creates anticipation because viewers understand the rule immediately: whatever happened last night, the next night will be worse.

🍶 Horror & Comedy Side by Side

Between the vigils, Viy repeatedly returns to comedy.

Khoma drinks.

He talks with the centurion’s servants.

Villagers tell stories.

People speculate about witches.

The young philosopher desperately looks for some way out of his obligation.

These scenes may seem like interruptions if Viy is approached as conventional horror, but they are fundamental to the film’s character.

Gogol frequently combined the grotesque with the ridiculous.

Fear becomes more effective because ordinary life continues around it.

The villagers can be funny precisely because the audience knows the church waiting nearby is not.

The film moves comfortably between laughter and nightmare without worrying that one will cancel out the other.

🌒 The Second Night

When Khoma enters the church for the second night, both he and the audience understand the danger.

The protective circle again becomes crucial.

The witch rises.

The supernatural assault becomes more aggressive.

The physical boundaries of the church seem increasingly unstable, and Khoma must rely upon prayers and ritual while his fear becomes harder to control.

The progression is important because the witch is not merely attempting to frighten him.

She is learning.

Each night becomes another attempt to overcome whatever protects Khoma.

He may survive temporarily, but the balance between them is shifting.

👻 Folk Horror Before “Folk Horror”

The phrase folk horror became widely used much later, but Viy fits comfortably within what modern audiences often mean by the term.

Its supernatural world emerges from rural belief rather than from scientific experimentation or an elaborate Gothic aristocracy.

The villagers know witches exist.

Stories circulate orally.

The countryside possesses spiritual danger.

Religion and older supernatural beliefs occupy the same cultural space.

The landscape itself seems capable of concealing forces that urban or educated characters might dismiss until they encounter them personally.

Khoma has formal theological training.

The villagers have stories.

It turns out that the stories may be more immediately useful.

🇺🇦 Ukrainian Folklore & Setting

The Ukrainian setting is essential to both Gogol’s story and the film.

The world of Viy draws upon imagery associated with the Ukrainian countryside, Cossack culture, Orthodox Christianity, village storytelling, and regional supernatural traditions.

This deserves emphasis because Viy is often discussed simply as a Russian or Soviet horror film without much attention to the Ukrainian cultural material underlying Gogol’s tale.

Gogol wrote primarily in Russian and became one of the foundational figures of Russian-language literature, but he was born in the Poltava region of present-day Ukraine, and his early fiction frequently drew upon Ukrainian folklore and settings.

Viy is one of the clearest examples.

Its horror grows directly from that cultural landscape.

🎭 Leonid Kuravlyov as Khoma

Leonid Kuravlyov is indispensable to the film because he refuses to turn Khoma into a conventional horror hero.

Khoma is frightened.

Very frightened.

He drinks to steady himself.

He tries to escape.

He complains about his situation.

He does not suddenly become fearless when danger arrives.

That vulnerability makes the supernatural sequences work.

The audience experiences them through someone who reacts much as an ordinary person might.

Kuravlyov also keeps the character funny without turning the entire performance into parody.

Khoma can be cowardly and sympathetic simultaneously.

We may laugh at him during the day while desperately wanting his protective circle to hold at night.

👰 Natalya Varley as the Pannochka

Natalya Varley gives the film its other essential performance as the centurion’s daughter, usually referred to simply as the pannochka, or young lady.

Her beauty is part of the horror because it creates a dramatic contrast with the old witch Khoma encountered earlier.

Which appearance is real?

Is the old woman a disguise?

Is the young woman a disguise?

Does the question even matter?

Varley spends much of the film as a corpse, yet her presence dominates the story. When the pannochka begins moving, the contrast between her pale stillness and the increasingly violent supernatural events surrounding her becomes deeply unsettling.

She does not need to transform into a grotesque monster.

The beautiful dead woman is frightening enough.

🎬 Konstantin Yershov & Georgiy Kropachyov

Viy was directed by Konstantin Yershov and Georgiy Kropachyov, young filmmakers who were still early in their careers.

The project gave them an unusually difficult assignment.

They had to adapt a famous literary work, create a convincing 19th-century setting, balance comedy with horror, and produce supernatural imagery on a scale unusual for Soviet cinema.

They were not working alone.

Aleksandr Ptushko became enormously important to the finished film, contributing to the screenplay and overseeing much of its fantasy and special-effects dimension.

The result sometimes feels like several filmmaking traditions meeting inside one picture.

There is literary adaptation.

Village comedy.

Period drama.

Religious imagery.

Fairy-tale fantasy.

And finally full-scale monster cinema.

✨ Aleksandr Ptushko & the Magic

Aleksandr Ptushko was one of the great fantasy filmmakers of Soviet cinema.

Long before Viy, he had built a career around ambitious fairy tales, miniature work, stop-motion, trick photography, elaborate sets, and other techniques for creating worlds that could not exist in front of an ordinary camera.

His experience was perfectly suited to Gogol.

Ptushko contributed to the screenplay and served as artistic supervisor while playing a major role in the film’s special effects and trick sequences.

The BFI specifically credits his effects work as a defining feature of Viy.

The difference becomes particularly apparent during the final night, when the relatively restrained supernatural activity of the earlier vigils gives way to an explosion of creatures, moving walls, impossible bodies, and distorted space.

The film stops pretending the church belongs to the ordinary world.

🎥 Practical Effects & Handmade Horror

One of the great pleasures of Viy today is seeing how much imagination filmmakers could produce without digital effects.

The flying coffin had to move.

The witch had to fly.

Creatures had to be built, costumed, painted, suspended, or manipulated.

Sets had to distort perspective.

Camera placement had to hide mechanisms.

Editing had to connect effects that could not be accomplished in a single shot.

The limitations are occasionally visible, but they rarely diminish the experience.

In fact, they often make the film more memorable.

The monsters have weight.

The props occupy the same environment as the performers.

The church becomes physically crowded with supernatural bodies.

Modern effects can create anything.

Viy creates only what its filmmakers could somehow build, rig, photograph, or trick the camera into seeing.

That restriction produces a wonderfully tactile nightmare.

🎨 A Storybook That Turns Into a Nightmare

Visually, Viy often resembles an illustrated book of folklore brought to life.

The countryside is colorful.

Costumes are expressive.

Village buildings feel almost storybook-like.

The comedy is broad.

Even the early supernatural scenes possess a certain fantastical playfulness.

Then the visual language changes.

The church becomes darker.

Shadows become deeper.

Human figures become smaller within the space.

By the final night, the film has moved from folk tale into something closer to a medieval nightmare painting.

This gradual transformation makes the climax much more effective than it would have been if the film began at full intensity.

🔔 Religion Without Simple Answers

Religion occupies a strange position in Viy.

Khoma is a theological student.

He prays.

He uses a sacred protective circle.

He reads over the dead.

The church contains Christian imagery.

Yet Khoma himself is hardly presented as spiritually exemplary.

His religious education has not necessarily made him virtuous or courageous.

The villagers’ world also blends Christian beliefs with older supernatural traditions in ways that resist a simple opposition between faith and superstition.

The film never becomes a straightforward lesson about religion defeating evil.

Khoma’s rituals offer real protection, but protection depends upon his ability to maintain faith, discipline, and courage.

That becomes increasingly difficult.

🌑 The Third Night

The third night is where Viy earns its reputation.

Khoma enters the church already exhausted and terrified.

He knows the witch has failed twice.

He also knows she will not simply repeat herself.

The final vigil becomes an escalating supernatural siege.

Creatures begin emerging into the church.

Hands reach outward.

Bodies crawl.

Faces appear where faces should not be.

The architecture seems infected by nightmare.

The sequence abandons the controlled emptiness of the first night and fills the screen with increasingly bizarre beings.

The church has become a gathering place for everything that belongs outside the ordinary human world.

👹 The Monsters Arrive

The creatures in the final sequence remain some of the film’s most unforgettable images.

They do not all conform to one coherent monster mythology.

That makes them stranger.

Some resemble demons.

Others appear distorted, animalistic, corpse-like, or almost impossible to categorize.

The effect resembles opening an old illustrated book of nightmares and allowing every creature on the page to crawl into the same room.

Their handmade appearance contributes to the dream quality.

Nothing looks quite natural.

Nothing should.

This is not a realistic ecosystem of monsters.

It is Khoma’s entire universe of fear taking physical form.

👁️ “Bring Me Viy”

Even these creatures cannot initially find Khoma within his protected circle.

The pannochka finally calls for Viy.

The other creatures bring forward a heavy, squat being whose enormous eyelids cover his eyes.

He cannot raise them himself.

He orders the creatures around him to lift them.

The moment is terrifying because the film has spent nearly its entire running time withholding the creature named in its title.

Viy does not need a long appearance.

His importance comes from anticipation.

When his eyes are finally uncovered, his gaze breaks the protection that has hidden Khoma.

Viy sees him.

That is enough.

⏰ Don’t Look

Khoma’s fatal weakness is not simply that Viy exists.

It is that Khoma looks.

The scene belongs to an ancient family of supernatural stories in which survival depends upon obeying a rule.

Do not leave the circle.

Do not respond.

Do not turn around.

Do not look.

Khoma knows better, but terror and curiosity overcome him.

Once he meets Viy’s gaze, the final barrier collapses.

The tragedy is therefore psychological as much as supernatural.

The monster possesses terrible power.

Khoma’s fear gives that power access to him.

🐓 Dawn Comes Too Late

The climax also plays with the familiar folkloric idea that supernatural forces lose their power at dawn.

If Khoma can simply survive until morning, the nightmare should end.

But timing becomes everything.

The boundary between night and day arrives just too late to save him.

The creatures rush to escape as morning approaches, and the church is left devastated by the night’s supernatural invasion.

The conclusion does not offer the clean victory often found in fairy tales.

Khoma had survived two nights.

He nearly survived the third.

Nearly is not enough.

😈 Scary, Funny & Completely Strange

One reason Viy remains so enjoyable is that it never decides horror must be humorless.

The movie can be genuinely eerie and then suddenly ridiculous.

A drunken conversation can follow supernatural terror.

A frightening creature may also look bizarre enough to inspire nervous laughter.

Khoma’s panic is both funny and understandable.

This tonal flexibility places the film closer to folklore than to many modern horror movies.

Traditional tales frequently contain grotesque comedy alongside violence and supernatural fear.

Death can be frightening.

Death can also be absurd.

Gogol understood that extremely well.

So does Viy.

🚫 Horror in Soviet Cinema

The film’s place within Soviet cinema makes it particularly unusual.

Horror was not a major officially cultivated genre in the Soviet film industry. Supernatural material certainly existed in fairy tales, literary adaptations, animation, fantasy, and folklore films, but films constructed primarily around fear and monsters were rare.

Viy found a path through that environment partly because it carried the cultural authority of Gogol.

This was not simply a newly invented monster movie.

It was an adaptation of a 19th-century literary classic.

Folklore and literature created room for imagery that might have been more difficult to justify in a straightforward contemporary horror production.

The result was a horror film that could also be presented as literary heritage.

🩸 Is Viy Really the First Soviet Horror Film?

Calling Viy the first Soviet horror film is common, and Mosfilm itself uses that description.

The BFI has gone even further in discussing it as the first and, depending upon how strictly the genre is defined, perhaps essentially the only major Soviet horror film of its era.

The claim works best when understood as shorthand rather than an absolute rule.

Earlier Soviet cinema contained frightening, fantastic, supernatural, and Gothic imagery, and later films sometimes incorporated material that modern viewers might classify as horror.

Genre boundaries are rarely neat.

What makes Viy exceptional is how completely it embraces the machinery of horror: a witch, a corpse, a haunted church, protective magic, escalating nightly attacks, monsters, demonic forces, and a final supernatural creature whose gaze brings destruction.

Whatever came before it, there is little ambiguity about what Viy wants viewers to feel.

It wants them to be afraid.

🎼 Karen Khachaturian’s Music

The score by Karen Khachaturian contributes significantly to the film’s movement between comedy, fantasy, and terror.

Music helps prevent the different tonal worlds from breaking completely apart.

The village sequences can feel lively and earthy, while the church scenes move into increasingly ominous territory.

During the supernatural passages, sound becomes particularly important because the audience often knows something is changing before the visual threat becomes fully visible.

The film understands a basic principle of horror.

Fear begins before the monster arrives.

📹 Color Makes the Horror Stranger

The color photography also distinguishes Viy from the shadow-heavy black-and-white tradition associated with much classic Gothic horror.

The film does not depend entirely upon darkness.

Daytime scenes can be warm and colorful.

Costumes stand out.

The countryside can look inviting.

The church contains painted imagery and textured surfaces rather than disappearing into monochrome gloom.

This makes the movement from ordinary life into supernatural terror more pronounced.

The nightmare does not belong to a permanently dark universe.

It erupts into a colorful world.

🖼️ Religious Art Comes Alive

The painted religious imagery inside the church adds another unsettling layer.

Faces surround Khoma.

Saints and holy figures occupy the walls.

The dead woman lies at the center.

As supernatural forces take over the building, the distinction between painted image, sculpted creature, living body, and corpse begins to collapse.

The church almost becomes a giant animated artwork.

Figures seem capable of leaving surfaces.

Forms emerge from darkness.

Architecture becomes theatrical scenery.

Ptushko’s fantasy instincts make the building feel less like a realistic location than an enormous supernatural machine.

🧱 A Deliberately Artificial World

Some viewers approaching Viy for the first time may be surprised that its effects do not strive for modern photographic realism.

That artificiality is one of its strengths.

Sets look designed.

Flying effects look physically staged.

Creatures look constructed.

The final church resembles a theater in which impossible things are happening before us.

This gives Viy a visual connection with stage illusion, fairy-tale illustration, puppetry, and early cinematic trick films.

The audience is invited to enjoy the illusion rather than forget an illusion exists.

Instead of asking, “Does this look completely real?” a more rewarding question is, “How did they make this happen?”

🎪 Cinema as Magic Trick

In that sense, Viy belongs to a tradition extending back to the earliest fantasy filmmakers.

Cinema has always possessed a relationship with magic.

Stop the camera and an object disappears.

Reverse the film and something reconstructs itself.

Suspend an actor and a human being flies.

Build a miniature and a small object becomes monumental.

Ptushko’s work throughout Soviet fantasy embraced this tradition.

Viy brings those techniques into horror.

The final result does not merely tell a story about magic.

The filmmaking itself feels magical.

🌍 International Life of Viy

Mosfilm notes that Viy became a successful release and was shown outside the Soviet Union as well as domestically.

Over subsequent decades, it developed an international cult reputation among horror fans, fantasy enthusiasts, and viewers interested in Soviet cinema.

That reputation expanded considerably once restored editions and home-video releases made the film more accessible outside Eastern Europe.

For viewers accustomed primarily to American, British, Italian, or Japanese horror, Viy offers a distinctly different visual tradition.

It feels familiar enough to recognize as horror and strange enough to seem newly discovered.

🎞️ Restoration & Rediscovery

Mosfilm restored the film in 2018, helping preserve its extraordinary color, elaborate production design, and effects work for later audiences.

The restoration is especially valuable for a film whose visual appeal depends heavily upon physical texture.

Wood.

Fabric.

Paint.

Smoke.

Costumes.

Creature surfaces.

Old effects films can lose much of their impact when viewed through faded or damaged copies.

Restoration allows the craftsmanship to become visible again.

It also reminds us that Viy is not merely a cult curiosity.

It is part of the cinematic heritage Mosfilm itself continues to preserve.

🧙 Gogol’s Continuing Influence

Viy has inspired multiple adaptations and works influenced by Gogol’s story.

Long before the Soviet film appeared, the tale’s combination of witchcraft, a vigil beside a corpse, and a supernatural assault had already attracted filmmakers.

Its imagery continued to echo through later horror cinema, and other adaptations have approached the material from dramatically different directions.

The story’s durability is easy to understand.

Its basic structure is perfect for horror.

One person.

One room.

Three nights.

One rule keeping evil away.

Then the rule fails.

Filmmakers can reinvent everything around that structure while preserving the nightmare at its center.

🕸️ Why Viy Still Works

The film remains effective partly because it understands escalation.

The first night does not show everything.

The second night raises the danger.

The third night explodes.

Modern horror occasionally exhausts its audience by revealing too much too early.

Viy waits.

For most of the film, the title creature has not even appeared.

By the time he finally arrives, viewers have already experienced witches, levitation, a flying coffin, supernatural attacks, and a church full of demons.

The movie has trained us to expect the impossible.

Then it introduces something worse.

🎃 An Ideal Halloween Soviet Film Wednesday

Among the many films that fit Comet Atomic’s Soviet Film Wednesday series, Viy is especially perfect for October.

It has witches.

A corpse.

Demons.

A haunted church.

Flying coffins.

Protective circles.

Monsters.

Folklore.

And one unforgettable creature whose eyes should probably remain closed.

Yet it also offers far more than a collection of Halloween images.

It connects Soviet fantasy filmmaking with Nikolai Gogol, Ukrainian folklore, 19th-century literature, practical special effects, Orthodox imagery, and the unusual history of horror within Soviet cinema.

That combination makes Viy worth revisiting even after Halloween decorations have disappeared.

✨ The Lasting Spell of Viy

More than half a century after its 1967 release, Viy still feels wonderfully strange.

Its special effects belong visibly to another era, but that does not make them lifeless. Quite the opposite. The flying coffin has physical presence. The monsters occupy real space. Natalya Varley’s witch seems to float between beauty and death, while Leonid Kuravlyov makes Khoma’s terror convincing because he never pretends his character was born to be heroic.

The film also preserves one of the qualities that makes folklore so enduring: terror and humor are never very far apart. Villagers drink and gossip while witches roam the countryside. A seminary student knows his prayers yet desperately wants to run away. Sacred architecture becomes a monster-filled nightmare. The terrifying Viy finally appears after an entire film has taught us that almost anything may emerge from the darkness.

Calling Viy the first Soviet horror film gives it a useful place in cinema history, but its appeal is much greater than a historical first.

It remains a fantastic piece of filmmaking in its own right.

The lights go out.

The dead woman rises.

Khoma draws his circle.

And for three nights, the old church belongs to the monsters.