VIY: Ukrainian Film Week at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

VIY closes Ukrainian Film Week with candles, coffins, demons, flying witches and one of the strangest church vigils in cinema history. Based on Gogol’s famous folk-horror story, the film follows Khoma, a young seminary student who is forced to spend three nights praying over the body of a dead young woman inside a remote village church. A simple assignment. Obviously it goes terribly.

Widely regarded as the first Soviet horror film, VIY occupies a strange place in cinema history. Horror didn’t fit easily into Soviet cultural life, with its demons, superstition, religious fear and private terror. The film found a way through by entering under the respectable cover of Gogol, folklore and literary adaptation. That makes it both a genre landmark and a very odd survivor of Soviet film culture.

The film’s roots are not Hollywood gothic, but Gogol’s Ukrainian folk imagination: village superstition, witches, Cossack-era religious anxiety, comic grotesquerie and the fear of what waits outside the circle of candlelight. The effects are theatrical rather than realistic, which is exactly why they still work. Painted sets, practical creatures, swirling camera tricks and grotesque faces give VIY the feeling of a nightmare assembled on a studio floor by people having far too much fun.

Closing Sunday’s Myths & Nightmares After Dark program after HOMEWARD and SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS, VIY gives Ukrainian Film Week the ending it deserves: compact, cult, spooky, and completely unhinged. If you only come to one late screening this week, make it this one.