My ill-advised endeavor to watch the top 200 horror movies of all time, plus 100 additions, in order to determine a definitive (read: completely subjective) Top 100 continues.

Viy, based on the 1835 novella of the same name by Nikolai Gogol, was the first horror film released in the USSR. It tells the story of a seminary student, Khoma (Leonid Kuravlyov), who, along with a couple of his classmates, gets lost in the countryside while traveling home on vacation from the seminary. Seeking shelter for the night, they come across a farmhouse inhabited by an old woman and her husband. The old woman tells the young men that they may stay the night but they’ll have to sleep separately as there isn’t much room. In the middle of the night the old woman enchants the young seminarian and rides him like a horse. In this dash they fly over the countryside which shifts and changes in hallucinatory kaleidoscopics. The soon-to-be-priest gathers his wits and begins to pray. The pair slowly descend, and once on the ground, which has now returned to its natural state, he beats the witch to death. The witch, however, turns into a beautiful young woman as she’s dying.

Later, Khoma is summoned by a rich Cossack merchant whose daughter has been beaten and lies dying. It seems the daughter has specifically requested that Khoma be the one to give her her final prayers. The girl dies before Khoma arrives, but the merchant forces him to pray over her anyway. He is meant to spend three nights with her body in the mausoleum, praying for her soul each night. But the witch is not done with Khoma. Not even in death.

I’ve recently had the pleasure of reading some of Gogol’s works of grotesque absurdism, of which Viy is one, and this film nails his tone of absurd humor and convicted acceptance of even the wildest contrivances. Gogol claimed, as the filmmakers do as well, that the stuff of Viy was based in the folklore of “Little Russia” (Ukraine), that it was in effect “true”, but contemporary folklorists believe that the stalk-eyed demon and his minions are wholly the invention of Nikolai Gogol. It is this earnest presentation of surreal horror and witchcraft that help sell this weird beast of a story; half horror, half Oedipal comedy, with the witch representing mother and lover, both of whom are something to be cast out by a young would-be priest.

The horror aspect doesn’t really ramp up until the final act, when Viy and his minions are finally summoned, and the work of special effects master Aleksandr Ptushko is put to the test. I’ve gotta be honest here, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the like when it comes to Ptushko’s combination of in-camera tricks and practical creature effects. He is working on another level in spite of, or more likely because of, budget constraints. It’s a glorious sequence that, together with the earlier flying scene, form the film’s finest selling points.

During a time when english folk horror was chiefly concerned with the troubling influence of Satan in the lives of its young people, the Soviets dared to do something different: be uncompromisingly weird af.

We’re firmly back in my wheelhouse for this one; Viy is essential folk horror viewing.