Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema, we're going to be talking about the nineteen sixty seven Soviet folk horror film V, a story about a ne'er do well seminary student who bumbles his way into a blood curdling confrontation with witchcraft, living death, and the armies of Hell via some absolutely
amazing nineteen sixty special effects. V was based on an eighteen thirty five novella by the author Nikolai Gogel, and it gets its title from the name of a monstrous creature that the protagonist is brought face to face with at the climax of the story. So in the author's note of the top of the novella, Gogol describes the V as the king of the gnomes, whose eyelashes reached to the ground. Do you get much of a gnome feeling when we finally see the V in this thing.
In a well, in a sense, cinematically, it reminds me, It reminds me of the was it a Nome King and returned to oz.
Oh. Yes, he's called the Nome King without a g it's just me.
Yeah, So it did remind me of that. I was digging into this a little bit. And the story is supposedly derived in large part from Ukrainian folklore. Gogel was himself Ukrainian born, and we can think of this as as very much Ukrainian story that we're discussing here. But apparently there's some discussion as to whether nomes actually factor into Ukrainian folklore. So it's very possible that the entity V is the element in the story that is pretty much a creation.
Of the author.
Here.
This is Gogel's.
Creation, and we can look to various things he might have drawn upon from other cultures, like it has again like what I eyelids or eyebrows that cover eyes that cast a deadly ray. This reminds us a little bit of in Irish mythology, the King of the Fomorians, whose lids are like that. I think his brow hangs down over a terrifying gaze. And if you raise that brow, if others raise it for him, then he can decimate the enemy.
I don't know what exact word go Gol would have used that these authors translate as Gnome in that note, but yeah, the king of the gnomes at least in that English rendering.
Well, I love the way it comes together, and we'll be talking about this a lot, because, yeah, everything comes to a head in this movie when V actually takes the stage and there's just it's just such a weird entity. The presentation is so strange and does feel, you know, certainly, you know, to my eyes, and I think to maybe like international viewers at least, but also perhaps viewers of the film as well, like there's just an otherworldly weirdness
to it. And that's exactly what you should feel when, like, you know, unknown darkness is boiling up and overcoming of all of the things that you thought were going to protect you from their ravaging power.
Though I do think it's interesting that the title of this movie and of the novella that it's based on, is taken from the name of a creature which does not appear until the very last few minutes of the film, and unless I missed something, is never mentioned before that. It's not like, oh, you're going to have to meet V soon. I don't think VE ever comes up until right before he summoned.
Oh no, he's just he's the culmination of the film. But he's not a culmination and anyone's really prepared for.
But well, I mean that's sort of a great metaphor for what the movie is overall. This this film is quite famous for storing up its demonic payload for a sudden and overwhelming deployment in the final few minutes. And Rob, you and I had discussed before, you know, should we do this movie. It had come up, but I think we had both read people saying on the internet, like it's kind of slow for most of the runtime, though the last few minutes are amazing. I'm going to stick
up for the rest of the runtime. I think this is a pretty great movie end to end. Though it's hard to deny that it really saves it really saves the bang for the very end.
That is true, absolutely. I mean, we've discussed other films that do this as well. I mean the last fifteen minutes of the film, the least ten minutes of the film, or even just the last act, Like that's the time when you have your monster go on a full rampage and it's fully visible to the audience. That's the time also when key bad guys might melt or explode. So it makes sense that you would save your special effects fiasco for that portion of a film. But I agree
with you. I think that I think that the rest of the film absolutely holds up and lays the groundwork and builds up to that moment in a wonderful way. But yeah, it is It is still definitely the case that most of the clips you might have been exposed to concerning this film, the images you might have been exposed to, and certainly some of the poster are you know, the main selling point it is from the final like
ten minutes or so of the movie. And so on one hand, like all of that is the thing that you absolutely use to pull someone in, and if you're telling somebody about v you're going to say, hey, make sure you watch those last ten minutes. But you almost do it a disservice because it kind of can lead to this idea that it might be lopsided and it's
maybe a slog to get there. But yeah, there's still plenty of weirdness, there's humor, beautifully sought shot sets and locations, so the journey is worth it.
As well. Yeah, I totally agree. The special effects centerpiece is the climax of the film, but there's a lot to love before we get to that. Like you say, it is very funny throughout and even beyond that, the ending is not the only thing where there's something really beautiful and interesting to look at. Like throughout the movie, there are there's some beautiful cinematography. There's some great locations.
I love the chapel where the climax takes place. We get there early on and get to survey all the different little nooks and crannies of it. In earlier scenes. There are some beautiful uses of actual outdoor locations, some really cool indoor for outdoor sets that highlight these these blue slavic atmospherics that just make the world feel like it's humming with witchcraft. Yeah, I loved it. I thought this is a great film. Yeah.
Plus, not all the special effects are saved for encounters with the unseen world. We also get a great scene where our lead character just gets terribly drunk with some Cossacks, and so we get some great like spinning room sequences like triple vision, you know, and it has nothing to do with magic. It's just that he's really, really drunk.
The Cossack Boss appears coming out of three different doors at the same time. Yes, it's pretty great that vodka will get you.
Yeah, there's a lot of vodka drinking in this so so yeah.
There.
On one hand, there's a lot of unknowable folk magic in this film. And our our our lead character is fresh out of seminary, and so he is.
He is a man of the cloth, but he's often described I think as a philosopher. Philoh.
They're always calling him that. They're saying, hey, philosopher, come over here.
That may be a kind of mocking title, and I'm not entirely sure how that's intended. But yes, he's a he's a seminary student. He is studying with the clergy. I don't know if his plan is to become a member of the clergy, but he's he's he knows how to say prayers and read books. Yeah.
But the interesting thing, and we'll come back to this a number of times, I think, is for this seminary. And his faith is not enough, like the power. I don't know if the power of God is even enough, but at least his his faith in the power of God is not enough to save him in the end, and he has marginal success with like a magic circle,
which doesn't feel expressly Christian. And of course the main action, like the most terrifying things in the picture, take place within this kind of gloomy, creepy chapel that's decorated with night gallery worthy paintings of Christ and saints. And so, yeah, we see him in the midst of these trials. We see him appeal to race and nationalism as often as he appeals to God. And you know, he's reminding himself of his own faith and his resolve and the power
of Christ. But none of this is sufficient to stave off the forces of darkness.
Yeah, he does try to find recourse with a cossack as afraid of nothing, but yeah, yeah he is afraid. I like that you pointed out the creepiness of the paintings in the church, and this is before the church transforms into monster mode. It does go through a transformation where all of the paintings turn into paintings of devils and stuff, and we can revisit that later, but even in its daytime form, this church has images of the face of Jesus Christ that are so morbid and horrible.
It has this green, frowning Christ is just looking on you with absolute contempt. Yeah.
Creepiest chapels since a Lucarde.
Yeah here, but I agree with what you were saying here. I was actually going to say myself that in this film, it feels almost like Christianity is treated as simply an
alternate form of witchcraft. It's like the good witchcraft. I think a lot of horror movies that have this type of conflict, that throw a priest or a member of the clergy into conflict with witchcraft or the devil, have a framework that you could call magic versus religion, highlighting the different in form and structure of magic versus religion.
So in these types of stories, magic can be viewed as a chaotic, transactional system of power in which witches and sorcerers get strength by recruiting the help of these dangerous supernatural beings. And then you contrast that with religion, which is viewed as orderly, maybe inherently good, maybe a fully integrated thing in the lives of the practitioners, unlike magic, which is simply for sourcing power, and that the power from the religion comes from a predictable God and his
earthly authorities. But in the Coma's Christianity does not feel like an orderly system that is integrated and meaningful throughout his whole life. Did you get that feeling at all?
Right? Right, he is in a very shaky place with it. And I guess there's a lot of commentary that seems to be going on here, some some criticism of religion as a whole, and you know, pretty much all of the religious figures in the in the movie are portrayed as being well drunks in many cases, as being letcherus.
Like the movie opens with them like what breaking, Like the seminary is breaking for the summer or something, and they let the students loose and they're like already like ones, like trying to get a goat to read the Bible. They head out, they start drinking, they're like chasing women across the fields, like they're just these do not feel like men of God that have been or even future
men of God that have been released. So there's there's always this sense of hypocrisy with the way the people of Christ are portrayed in this film.
Yes, the seminary students as a whole at the beginning are portrayed as an almost malevolent, chaotic force, like so you said the opening scene, the rector comes out of the seminary and lets them loose for vacation, and as soon as they're released, yet they're just they swarm over the town, looting and pillaging. So and I do want to emphasize that it's not just like a little harmless mischief. They are like an attacking army that is sacking a city.
So they run to the market and they steal everything that's not tied down in the market. They are shown kidnapping women from the fields doing their laundry. It's just mayhem.
Yeah, though with all of this with an intended comedic flare, that needs to be sure.
And you know, we're used to seeing stories where the clergy are depicted ironically, maybe highlighting vices.
Or yet like the drug friar is a common trope.
For exactly yeah, totally ways that the clergy might fail to live up to what they preach. But I think this is significantly over that line. It's it's it is still played for comedy, but it's more than just some light ribbing of the priesthood. These these seminary students are like locusts.
Yeah yeah, and I think in some of this we can detect a bit of that so yet era atheism in its portrayal of organized religion here as lazy, hypocritical,
and ineffective. And it's interesting to potentially see that here because we've definitely looked at plenty of examples of cinema from different countries under different regimes and different standards and practices, which you know, interfere with not portraying like, say, you know, the Christian faith or some sort of some sort of set of morals as being superior to the forces of darkness, or as being like some sort of backbone you can depend upon.
Yeah, so here you might be getting a counterposed type of anti clerical piety. But yeah, so anyway, I just to come back and finish the thought I started a minute minute ago about the Christianity and the movie feeling not really like a religion, but feeling like an alternate form of witchcraft. I think when you actually get into the exorcism or prayer scenes, you know, we're used to
seeing these exorcism scenes in movies like The Exorcist. We've done exorcism movies on weird House before, where there's a spiritual battle, often of words going on, a ritual, rituals fighting back and forth, or ritual versus a kind of projection of profanity by the demonic forces. A lot of times those scenes emphasize the confidence and the rectitude of the orderly forces representing the whole apparatus of religion. This
movie doesn't feel like that at all. Instead, it feels like Coma is trying to hold up the Christian rights and prayers as this tenuous system of apotropaic magic. It's like, these are the charms and hexes he knows that can, hopefully, with a bit of luck, keep the devils from killing him. And it doesn't work. Yeah.
In a way, you could almost imagine him expecting Satan to make an appearance at the end, but there's no Satan. There's the He might be like, who the heck is the you know, I wasn't prepared for this at all, and the creatures of the night would just tell him, yeah, you were not.
There is no day, only the yeah. Yeah.
Now it's worth addressing that this is a then Soviet Union film produced by Moss Film, based on the work of a Russian author of Ukrainian origin, set and filmed for outdoor scenes at least in what is now Ukraine, and featuring a mix of Soviet actors and filmmakers, some of whom had Ukrainian origins, So it has a distinctive Ukrainian flair. But again, film during the nineteen sixties when Ukraine was part of the USSR, and set during the eighteenth century when this part of Ukraine was ruled by
the Cossack Hetmanate. So at any rate, referring to the film and the work of Gogel, it is highly accurate to call this a work of Ukrainian full.
Car Yeah, very much Ukrainian in setting and feeling. But I think it'd be also worth addressing the second half of what you said, they're Ukrainian full corror? Is this full corror? I encountered this movie actually because it came with a box set that I recently ordered, Rob. I think maybe you were going to bring this up anyway. I ordered the Severin Films collection called All the Haunts Be Hours, a compendium of full corr Volume one, Rob, Have you check this out?
I have looked at it longingly, because you know, it looks amazing. It has what fifteen discs in it. It's films from different eras, different countries, all kind of loosely under the umbrella of full car.
I haven't watched all the movies in it yet, but I think you could argue that this film selection is very much curated. It's not just one of these collections where what movies could we get, let's throw them together, And the films feel very carefully selected to kind of tell a story about what full core is and could be. And in that sense, it is accompanied by a there's a documentary called A Woodland's Dark and Days Bewitched. This is a documentary about the history of full corror as
a genre. Especially interesting because full corror, though it's a term we use now all the time, when a lot of the movies within the genre of full carr were made, there wasn't. This wasn't really a concept people were referring to. A lot of the people didn't think I'm making a full corror movie. It's like a more recently applied term.
Usually, yeah, yeah, you would be more I think likely to have a film like this described. It might be described as horror, but probably more likely to be described as fantasy or a fairy tale.
Yes, exactly. It is the folk tale framing or the fairy tale or folk tale framing that I think probably would have come first to mind of the filmmakers in this case, and in a lot of the earlier films that are now thought of as full core. But there's like in this documentary about what full core is and where it comes from there, or all these descriptive phrases people are coming up with to to try to describe
the genre. And I thought that part was very interesting, just in how a full car is one of these things that I had never thought to try and define before, but I totally know it when I see it, but I couldn't come up with a comprehensive definition of what fits.
It has very fuzzy edges, but those edges overlap somehow with witchcraft, paganism, anything pre Christian resurfacing in the Christian context, and also is very much about like buried layers of previous culture or the past being sort of unearthed and brought up into a more modern context. And putting all these things together, I was starting to wonder, wait a minute, is the actually full car? It feels like full car
it feels like it fits. Maybe it's just that it's one thing about the clash between Christianity and witchcraft, like that alone is enough to get you there. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean it's it's one of those things it's hard to nail down, you know. We can there's certain things we can we can look at and we can be like, oh, yeah, of course blood on Satan's clause it's full Car or you know, or the wicker Man. But then you you can also bring up a movie like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which I think you can make a case for there being some strong Full Car elements there without it being like so clearly full Car that you you know that you would you would never miss it.
That's sort of yeah. Well, it's interesting because a lot of the key elements of Full Care are are also very common in movies that people don't think of as Full Car. For example, one of the key things, like one of the most common plot structures of Full Car people critics identified this a lot is a naive city dwelling outsider or scholar goes into a rural place and discovers a pagan conspiracy or some kind of some kind
of ancient or superstitious horror taking place there. Yeah, now that you know, that's kind of the wicker Man that's in a lot of these full Correr movies of the past and the craft, yeah, and of the present. But it's also just like you start thinking about it, Oh, that's so much horror. That's things we don't think of full car at all. Lots of slasher movies or about like a naive city dweller who goes out into a
rural place and stumbles upon some kind of conspiracy. I guess in some of those cases where where we have these slasher movies that have that structure but don't feel like full cor I was trying to think, why don't they feel like full core. Maybe it's just because there are no real elements of like displaced ancient culture or rituals or paganism. Maybe you need that kind of element to cement the full core connection.
Yeah, yeah, I think so. And so like with Texas Chainsaw Masacre, you get some slight hints of that with some of like the the little dabbles that they decorate the trees with, you know it, but it's not really dwelled upon. It's kind of faint. And then there are some other bells and whistles in that film that kind of make you look in different directions, like astrological data and so forth.
This movie, actually, now that I think about it, it does have that structure too, doesn't it. Because Coma is from the city. He's a he's a student, a scholar from Kiev who goes out into the country and stumbles across some witchcraft. So I didn't even think about that when I started describing this, but that is right. That is basically the structure of the plot.
Yeah, the locals are making him do something. He tries to run away from his responsibilities. They catch him and they lock him back in and they make him do his job.
Yeah, yeah, you could.
You could easily imagine like a Southern exploitation treatment of this exact same plot.
So that's interesting. Yeah, student wanders off campus from Liberty University and has like Southern Baptist student is out there, runs into some country witchcraft. Yeah I love it.
Yeah, somebody do it all right, So if you would like to watch v for yourself or rewatch it as the case may be, As Joe mentioned, that excellent box set All the Haunts Be Hours, a compendium of Folk Are Volume one. I believe there are two volumes out now, it might be three. There might be three, Okay, well, Volume one's the one you want to pick up if
you want to watch this film. This episode came together rather quickly, so I ended up watching it via the Eternal Family streaming service, which I also highly recommend a great source for weird housey selections from around the world. All right, shall we get into the people behind this film?
Yes? Please? All right?
So I believe there may be more to this story. But essentially we have two credited directors, co directors, co writers. We have Konstantine Ershov who lived nineteen thirty five through nineteen eighty four, and then we have Gyorghi Kropatschev, who lived nineteen thirty through twenty sixteen. Both Russian born. Kropatschev would go on to make his mark in production design, mostly active through around twenty thirteen, and Ershov continue to
act right and direct into the nineteen eighties. But the various materials I've been looking at point to a third, more experienced man being the primary creative force behind this film. In fact, you'll see his name listed as a third director if you look at the IMDb listings for the film. I don't know that every database listed this way, but this individual is Alexander Patushko. He is credited as a writer, as a creative advisor, and the special effects supervisor on
the film. He lived nineteen hundred through nineteen seventy three.
I would kind of say that even if all he did were the special effects, he should probably get a co director's credit this movie. Yes, that's how important the special effects are.
Yeah. Yeah, he's a big deal Potushko. I don't think we've mentioned him on the show before, but we have at least referenced some of the films that he's done, or one in particular that will be known to certainly known to international audiences and known to Mystery Science Theater three thousand fans. So Patushko was a Ukrainian born filmmaker internationally recognized for a cinematic vision and for his contributions
to animation. This was obviously towards the very end of his life and career, so he'd only write and direct one more project, the nineteen seventy two fantasy epic Russwin and Ludmila. But his prior work goes back to nineteen twenty eight, and features such fantasy classics as nineteen thirty nine's The Golden Key, which I'm to understand is kind of a Russian Pinocchio. Nineteen forty six is The Stone Flower, nineteen fifty six is The Sword and the Dragon, nineteen
fifty nine's The Day the Earth Froze. These last two titles again should be familiar to MSD three K fans, as they were featured on that program.
I remember those titles, but I don't know if I've seen those episodes.
Oh they're pretty great, like there were films that I've never had the chance to see either of them in refined quality. I believe, at least The Sword and the Dragon. No, no, I believe The Day the Earth Froze as well. I think believe both of these films are available now on disc in beautiful restored quality, and I really need to see them. But I remember even watching them in kind of grimy quality on MSD three K, and certainly enjoying them.
Through the riffing. You could tell like, Wow, this is like really an amazing fantasy vision that we have here. So yeah, I really need to go back and give them a second look. Because potishco is and was largely regarded as a master, often compared to Walt Disney and Mario Bava for different reasons. He's largely credited with transforming this film into the form that makes it so memorable,
including its amazing effects. He was behind its wire stunts which hold up just exceedingly well, and it's overall horror pacing. Film historian Tim Lucas has written about this. I did not have a chance to read it myself, but I understand he wrote an essay about this and about Potushcode that was included in the printed material that came with like a European or a British release of the film V.
This is a film where I would say that the special effects in themselves feel like an art form. I don't know. Maybe actually that comes off as just denigrating special effects in general, which I don't mean to do. But sometimes I feel like special effects are there is certainly art to them in that the director presents a vision and the special effects tried to help the director achieve that vision, looking more or less realistic in camera somehow,
And that's not really what we get here. This is a movie where I feel a strong sense of style and sort of personal charisma of the artist in the special effects, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. The special effects of this film are just are essentially kind of its heart in a very authentic way. Not in a sense like the rest of the movie is forgettable, but the effects are great. Like the effects feel like the beating heart of the picture.
Yeah, all right.
So again, both co directors and Putushco have writing credits on this but again it is based on this original novella by Nikolai Gogel, who lived eighteen oh nine through eighteen fifty two, Russian writer of Ukrainian origin, best known both within Russian and Ukrainian literature as well as internationally for his works on political corruption, notably the eighteen forty
two novels Dead Soles and The Government Inspector. But he's also highly regarded for his short fiction, including eighteen thirty five's Diary of a Madman, which some of you are familiar. This is about a character named Ozzy who turns into a werewolf. I think, yeah, yeah, no actual connection I think to the nineteen eighty one Ozzy Osbourne album. But he was on a bark at the moon seiking a bark at the moon. Yeah, I was bark at the moon on Diary of a Mad Man. Or is that
that's what I was asking? I don't, oh, I don't remember. Some of the Azzie albums kind of bleed together in my memory. But Gogel was also influenced, especially in his early works, by Ukrainian folklore and in general relished in the grotesque. V is a novella included in a volume two of his collected tales titled Mirgorod. Gogel died before the advent of the cinematic age, but his work has
been adapted many many times. V especially has been adapted like I couldn't even really put together a full list because like it begins as early as nineteen oh nine and then as recently as twenty fourteen, there was a Russian Ukrainian film known internationally as Forbidden Empire for some reason, but it had an international cast. It has spawned two sequels. There's like V two, where they go to China, and then V three I think is coming in which they
go to India. There's no reason for there to be that much international travel in a V film, it seems to me.
Which is the one you showed me that did it have Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Charles Dance.
Yes, yes, that's the second one, the V film that takes place in China, and I can't remember what its international release title is, but they remove V from it. Yeah. Yeah, there's not only is there are there contemporary V films series in Russian cinema. There there are also a couple of films in which Gogel himself his position is like a crime solving figure, which I found kind of interesting.
Like Abraham Lincoln Vampire.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, like, yeah, not to say that it's it's I mean, it's exactly the same thing that US cinema has done and will continue to do. But you know it's interesting to see that same energy but with like different literary and historical figures.
Yeah.
So the story by gogle here V or the V was also apparently the inspiration or a partial inspiration for Mario Baba's nineteen sixty film Black Sunday, and as Anne Bilson points out in an article for Sid and Sound from April of twenty twenty one, this film the sixty seven can be seen as quote a patriotic correction to Mario Baba's Black Sunday, based only very loosely on the same Gogle story and seen in the USSR as a Hollywood travesty of the source material, probably because the version
distributed there was the American Duboe.
We just did Black Sunday last October on the show for a Weird House Cinema. That's the one where Barber Steel makes the most demonic face a person has ever made.
Yeah, and so I mean, you can you can see where Bob was at least partially inspired by this tale, by this novella, but the the final form of Black Sunday, and certainly that the structure of the thing is rather different from these Yeah, but you can also you can understand where where some people might take offensive they thought that source material was being mistreated in some fashion.
It almost feels like a spiritual adaptation. I'm trying to think what elements of the plot are actually poured it over. It doesn't feel like much. Creepy lady, Yeah, there's a creepy lady.
Okay, Yeah, all right, let's get into the cast a little bit here. We've been talking about Coma already. He is the seminarian he's our main character. He is going to be our our unwitting and unprepared soldier of light, standing up against the darkness, rocking a hell of a bowl cut, Yes, an amazing bowl cut. And he is
played by Leonid Karavolyyov. He lived nineteen thirty six through twenty twenty two Russian and Soviet actor, best known internationally for this film, but his other films include the seventy three comedy Ivan Vasselevich Changes his profession, and also an adaptation of Robinson Crusoe from the same year, in which he plays Robin Zona Cruso. So I'm very much the Russian treatment of the tale. He was highly regarded in Russian Soviet cinema, active in film from fifty nine through
twenty sixteen. He did tons of films, but only a few genre titles, and this being the only thing you could even classify as horror. Of note, I was just looking at some of the less well known films that he did, some of the later day films that he did. He played dead Moro's father, Frost, in a nineteen ninety seven film called New Year's Story, which somehow involves secret alien fighting government operatives and a Santa figure hiding in
playing sight at a Gorky Studios annual Christmas event. Okay, so yeah, that sounds interesting.
Merry Christmas.
But at any rate, as far as this film goes, I can't keep enough braves in his performance. I think coma is he's very sympathetic, but obviously he's riddled with dow. He's seeking momentarily momentary bursts of bravery through faith, through ethnic heritage, through strong drink, and none of this is enough to protect him, you know. And and yet again he's sympathetic, and he hits just the right comedic beats to keep everything from feeling too doomy, even though our
trajectory is very much one of doom. But that you know, it's there are enough comedic slip ups along the way that it doesn't feel I don't know, it doesn't feel bad. It feels it feels like a commentary on human nature.
Yeah, I think partially because it has the folk tale structure and because it's leavened with all this comedy. Even though the ending is very dark, it doesn't leave you feeling bad. I agree. Yeah, I walked away from this movie with a song in my heart, even though Koma dies spoiler. Yeah, it just it just felt all right.
Yeah, I mean afterwards, you just drink a little vodka, you eat a few raw onions, and you're you good to go.
The man that was great, who is that? Which character is that? He's got the green onions in his hand. He's just munching on one.
It's one of the two old friends from the seminary and they're like, yeah, yeah, he really got screwed on that one. And then they're supposed to be like painting something and doing some repairs, but they're just setting around drinking vodka and one of them is eating like raw green onions that he's picked or something.
The rector goes by, he's like, are y' all working? And they're like, yeah, we're working, but they're just sitting there drinking with their onions. All right.
So we have mentioned the creepy woman in this. Yeah, we'll get into the reasoning, but you know, she is a witch, but she's also like an undead body. She is dead, a beautiful woman who has died and doesn't
seem to want to stay dead. We'll get into the details of this, but the younger version of this character were given a name for her it's Panachka I Believe, and she is played by Natalia Varley born nineteen forty seven as of this recording, still with Romanian born Russian and Soviet film and theater actress active in film from
nineteen sixty two through twenty twenty two. This was only her third feature length film credit, following her role in a popular nineteen sixty four comedy titled Kidnapping a Caucasian Style, which launched her career. So it's interesting that both of our leads here, either beforehand or afterwards, would definitely make their mark in comedy in Russian comedy as well as this notable entry in what you could call full car.
Well, she has an almost clownish press in many of her scenes, actually the horror scenes, like with just a little tweak in tone, you could see a lot of her behavior going from scary to funny. I'm thinking about the way that in the haunting scenes she is often kind of jittering up and down and kind of jittering and chattering. It's it's a fantastically physical performance that you could see working well for like comedy, miming almost.
Yeah yeah, And she does really feel like a live wire. She is animated by strange energy. Yeah, that we can't quite understand, and even her designs are are kind of unknown. We'll get into that when we start talking about the Three Nights, the diseased Queen of the May Yeah, let's
see others. The other characters of note playing her father, the Satnik a centurion, is this act Alexei Glazurin who lived nineteen twenty two through nineteen seventy one, Soviet actor who credits include mostly supporting roles in various war dramas
throughout the fifties, sixties, and seventies. But coming back to what you were talking about, the line between comedy and horror in acting, we also have this old witch that shows up early in the picture and she is played by Nikolay Kutuzov who lived eighteen ninety seven through nineteen eighty one. So we've seen this before in Russian cinema.
Thinking back to Jack Frost, which we previously covered on Weird House, the casting of a male actor as a female witch, And I haven't read anything about this in Russian cinema, but I'm assuming this was just kind of standard practice at the time, which would seem to run kind of counter to what we're used to in other cinematic traditions, where you absolutely give older witch and crone roles to female performers, because I mean it's part of
the classic Hollywood type casting for older actresses, right.
Yeah.
But while in sixty five's Jack Frost in Morosco, Bobby Yaga is played by a male actor for largely comedic reasons, and it is it is a great performance here the old Witch is played mostly straight and menacing by this male performer. You know he's there. There is a little humor in the way this Witch is presented early on, but for the most part, this is this is an ominous figure. This is not someone that's there just for a bunch of like silly gags or anything.
Yes, the Witch is presented ambiguously at first. I mean, she's not overtly frightening when we first see her. As there's a scene where she has she takes in these lost seminary students into her house and she's like you have to sleep in different rooms and they're like okay. And then she appears Tacoma the student in the middle of the night and he's like, I don't know what what do you want what's going on? And then he thinks she's trying to seduce him, But she's not trying
to seduce him. She's about to turn him into a broomstick and ride him through the skies.
Yeah, that's the thing. Yeah, that's a great point about the ambiguity of it. Yeah, because it's not clear. It's like, is she she trying to seduce them? Does he want just she wants to drink his blood? No, it's something that makes even less sense to us mortals. She wants to ride him like a horse. She wants to jump on his shoulders and ride him through the sky. So, and we can't possibly understand the reasons for this.
And she's not you know, she's kind of smiling when she comes to him. So I don't know that this character. There's this very creepy sense of like, I don't know what's going on here. I don't know what to make of this. Yeah, and she becomes much more frightening actually after having transformed into into her young form, which I guess I have questions here about what was the Witch's true form. Maybe we can revisit that at the ending,
because do you remember how but at the end. After after the cock crows and all of the evil magic collapses, we see Panachka, we see the girl. She falls back into her coffin, and the coffin kind of explodes and she's transformed into the old witch form again. And I thought that the young form was her true form, because that's the form recognized by her father. But if she transforms back into the witch form, is that the true her was the young form some kind of mask. I don't know.
It doesn't completely make sense, but it feels like there's some sort of underlying sense to it, and I think that's that's why it works so well. But but yeah, it's like we can't quite understand what the connection here is. Yeah, all right, we mentioned that our main character gets drunk with a bunch of Cossacks that he travels with them. The Cossacks here are played by an ensemble of Ukrainian actors. The main one Dorosh. He's the big guy with this
signature Ukrainian haircut, the oscelidet. I may be saying that wrong. Please please forgive my non Slavic tongue here, as I struggle with some of these words. But this guy was apparently a pretty big deal in Ukrainian theater. His name was Petro Veklyirov, who lived nineteen eleven through nineteen ninety four. I think he also plays one of the characters of the seminary. I think he might have had another role in the picture as well, but his other credits include
sixty one Song of the Forest. This is another cinematic adaptation of Ukrainian folk tales or fairy tales, but a very big guy, stern faced. He's definitely one of the ones that's there too.
He's the guy.
This is the one who comes out of the three doors when Coma is drunk. And he's also one of the primary characters who intercepts Koma when he tries to run away from his responsibilities.
Like this guy, very solid, good drinking buddy apparently.
And finally the music here. The composition is by Kiaran Kotschaturan lived nineteen twenty one through twenty eleven, Russian composer of Armenian descent, active from nineteen fifty through two thousand. His work in film also included a number of animated shorts. But I thought the score was quite good here, really effective in some of those creepy tension building sequences.
There were certain points where it sounded like the strings in Night on Bald Mountains. Yes, yeah, absolutely, yeah, but before the main theme comes in, just kind of in that perpetual, like hovering high strings mode. Yeah, it's a very good music.
I thought, Okay, are you ready to talk about the plot.
Yeah, let's jump into it.
So for this movie, I'm not going to do a close scene by scene narration like we do for some films. Instead, I think we should do a quick summary of the plot as a whole, and then come back and look at some notable scenes and choices, especially the hauntings later on. But to do the summary, the story begins at a seminary in Kiev when all of the students are being sent home for vacation, and we fall in with three
students in particular Koliava Gora, Bets and Coma. And while making the journey home, the three of these students become lost at night, and they take shelter at a cottage belonging to an old woman who allows them to come inside but forces them to sleep each in separate parts of the house. Koma is sent to sleep in the barn, but at night he is awakened by the old woman, who seems at first maybe to be trying to seduce him.
He doesn't really know what she wants. And then Koma tries to escape, but he finds himself hypnotized or entranced, and then, to his horror, the old woman climbs up on his back, takes hold of a broom and begins to ride Coma like an animal, first out into the meadows beyond the house, and then finally up into the sky, and they fly around in the moonlight while the witch is squatting on his shoulders.
It's a wonderful sequence. And again this is just an example of how this film gets gets plenty weird rather quickly, so don't believe that this is a movie with only like ten minutes of weirdness capping the end of things.
While all of this is happening, of course, Coma is terrified and he finally manages to get out from under the witch. Does he say some magic words or something? Does he hold up across I don't remember what he does. He somehow squirms his way out.
Yeah, I mean I was kind of mesmerized by the whole sequence. It was one of these we see enough weird films. It's beautiful when you have this moment, we're like, I can't believe I'm watching this? What am I watching? And then and then it so the read I kind of got on. It is like she almost kind of like rides him until he's exhausted, Like she's like not in a physical sense perhaps, but in like a spiritual sense, you know. And they both kind of collapse into a field somewhere she has used.
Up all of his magic broom fuel, and they come down on the ground. And then when he gets out from under her, he suddenly takes hold of a stick and then beats her. He beats the witch until she cries for mercy and says that he is killing her. And to his astonishment, he looks down and the old crone now seems to have transformed into a beautiful young woman. And Cooma doesn't know what to make of this, but
he runs away terrified. He makes his way back to the seminary, where when he arrives, the rector tells him that a rich Sutnik, which again a type of a Cossack chief or leader. The Sutnik has sent his men to recruit Coma. Apparently this man's daughter is dying and she has asked for Coma Buying to come pray for her in her final hours. Cooma does not want to go,
but he has no choice. The satniks men compel him, and by the time he arrives, unfortunately, the girl has already died, and her father promises Coma a huge reward, many many gold coins if he will stay with her body in the chapel and pray over her for three nights. It was her final wish. But when Koma sees the girl's body lying in her coffin, he realizes, oh no, it's her. It is the witch that rode him through the sky, but not in her crone form, the young,
beautiful form that she transformed into after his beating. And now he realizes, oh no, it is probably his beating that killed her.
Yeah, and this is why she called for him.
Yeah. And he's trying to pretend to the father like, oh, I've never seen her before, I know what this is about. So the structure sure of the rest of the story is we follow Cooma for the three nights of the Bargain. On the first night, he is locked in the chapel with the witch's coffin, and in the middle of his prayers, the witch wakes up. Cooma is deeply afraid, but he is able to protect himself by drawing a magic circle
and reading the sacred words from his prayer book. But each night is of course more devilish than the last, and in the days in between these prayers, Koma tries to escape or to negotiate his way out of going back in the following night, but he always fails. On the second night, the witch curses him and makes his hair turn white. This is after some piloting the coffin through the air like an airship and ramming his magic circle.
Yeah, the second night certainly has a lot of spectacular special effects. The first night the dead Walk, the second night the dead.
Fly, the pilot. Yeah, the second night the greatest pilot in the gall and then the third night. We reached the climax of the story when the witch is just filled with venom and hate for Coma and she calls forth all of the vampires the werewolves. She actually uses the word verdilac, like we've talked about on the show before. The verdilachs calls out all the creeps and the monsters of Hell to slither out into the chapel and vomit
forth her vengeance onto this young student. And then finally at the end, the king of all the monsters the v is brought out and his great heavy eyelids are lifted and his gaze is fixed on Coma, and then all of the monsters fall on him and he dies.
Kind of reminded me of the part in the Simpsons tree House of Horror Shinning episode where Moe has the monsters go into the walk in freezer to drag over.
Out and it's all Freddy and Jason and all the other ghouls. Yeah. And then finally there's an epilogue where the other students comas friends from the seminary. They talk about what happened to him. They say, oh, he was a good guy. It's a tragedy that happened to him. And they have kind of different ideas about what it means, like maybe the story's not really true. One of them seems kind of doubtful. Another one says that all you have to do to protect yourself from witchcraft is make
the sign of the Cross and spit It's easy. Also, one of the guys is like, yeah, all the women in the market in town are witches, and yeah, so that's the story as a whole. But I thought we should come back and focus on some specific things. We'll definitely focus a lot on the Third Haunting, the Third Night. But one thing I wanted to talk about in the film throughout is the cinematic language of textures of decay,
of neglect and decay. The camera really lingers on cobwebs and dust and things being spilled or overgrown, all these visual signifiers of neglect and decay. And the credit it's actually at the beginning of the movie, play over quiet music and a static shot of cobwebs in a church corner, just billowing in a slight breeze. There's all this dust, these old candles. There's even one very small detailed that I noticed that I loved. I wonder if you caught
the same thing. And there's a scene part of the way through the movie when Coma is entering the chapel with a candle in his hand. I think it might be the scene when they're actually taking the girl's coffin into the chapel, or maybe it's another time he's entering, but he's holding a candle and his hand is actually covered with this bumpy, spilled layer of dried drip wax.
It's like he's been holding the candle forever and just letting the wax flow out onto his hand and solidify there over and over for a long time.
Yeah, there's some great details with the candle work in this film. I love the scene where he's coming into the chapel and he's like, chapel is not supposed to be this dark and gloomy. It's supposed to be a place of light, and he starts lighting all these candles to lighten things up, and of course this just makes the in in some ways, just makes the chapel look even creepier, right.
Yeah, totally. There's another thing I wanted to mention about the look and feel of the movie, which is the atmosphericx of the scene where the three students become lost and they have to go to the witch's house. So early in the film, I really think the landscape is infused with this feeling of witchcraft. So there are some scenes of real, actually beautiful outdoor vistas, but they are kind of creepy. Like there's one shot of the students
who have left the seminary. They're camping up on a hill overlooking a kind of misty swamp in the distance below, and they're burning of fire and it looks beautiful and
a little creepy at the same time. Other scenes are indoor for outdoor sets with this blue glowing sky with a painted backdrop and the evil magic here, I got the feeling that it comes out of the land and out of the sky, creating this feeling of witchcraft as a natural force or a natural law, something that kind of creeps in like vines upon an unmaintained lawn, which I thought was interesting because of these other things about decay and neglect, like just things being kind of untended
in the witchcraft taking them over.
There's also a great moment in this part of the film where they realize their loss. They realize they are not on a road anymore, and that in and of itself, I think ties in nicely with this, because what is a road but a road. It is the vein of civilization. It takes you back and connects you to the place of modernity and logic and reason that you hail from. And now you realize you were no longer on that road.
You are.
You belong to this land. Now you don't belong to that place back there.
I think in that same sequence, there's the part where one of the students is reaching around in the dark trying to grab the other one, and he gets horrified because he grabs something in his hand is full of rot. And then he realizes, oh, that was just a dead log. I thought I had grabbed your head. But there's another theme that I wondered what you made of. It's the
theme of singing in the face of fear. When the students first become lost in the beginning, they sing in the dark to make themselves unafraid when they're wandering after they've lost the road and they're wandering around in the fields with the blue sky. And then later at multiple times in the film, Coma sings songs to make himself unafraid. He sings that song that has the lyrics of a cossack has no fear, you know. There there's a kind of lyrical content where he's trying to beef himself up
to face the ghosts. But there is all so just a part at the end where in the final Haunting, he starts by reading the prayers from the Prayer Book and then starts getting louder and louder and singing them. I wonder what you thought. Is there any significance on this repeated theme about singing as an act that has warding power? Maybe?
Oh, I mean that's a deep topic we've touched on a little bit before, like, for instance, wist well, whistling, because on one hand, like whistling in the dark can be seen as a way to sort of keep darkness away, like how can you know what's going to attack me when I'm singing, Like there's kind of like a singing or whistling. But then at the same time, there are all these traditions about whistling being the very sort of thing that could invite creatures of darkness towards you. So
don't whistle in the dark? Ynd Yeah, so yeah, should I whistle? Should I not whistle? I don't know, but there is Yeah, you know, there's there's something deep in the human psyche about like how should I behave as
if something unseen is watching me? And of course the calculus there is different if you or considering you know, real life people you know and and you know a threat that is that is that is human, if you're considering a threat that is animal, or if you're considering a threat that you know is from the unseen world it is ghosts or spirits or demons or whatnot. And
maybe in some cases like loudness is the defense. I mean, loudness in one form or another is often tied to exorcism and and and magical rights to drive away monsters and horror.
Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on what is your relationship to the thing you're afraid of. You know, people talk about wandering in the wilderness. It often is good to be loud, because then you're less likely to accidentally stumble across some kind of you know, encounter with the beast that you don't want to startle. You know, they'll hear you coming if you make a lot of noise, So that could be helpful in that sense if you
were actually thinking about a malevolent, predatory, supernatural creature. In that case, you'd almost think, you don't it to know where you are, so you shouldn't make any noise at all. But maybe the effect of singing very loudly it's like a way of convincing yourself that there is no danger, because if there is danger, this would be really stupid to do. So, you know, there better be no danger because of how much attention I'm attracting with this loud singing. Yeah.
I mean, there's so many ways to think of, like yeah, I'm reminded of the bit from the rhyme of the ancient marin or you know, like one that on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread, and having once turned round, walks on and turns no more his head, like, so, don't look back at the thing that you know is back there. But on the other hand, there's also the value of like, yeah, like shout at the devil, yell at the devil, curse the devil, throw things at the devil.
You need to go on the offense. That's the only way to protect yourself, calm. I should have thought of that here. He mainly is on defense. Yeah, relies a lot on that chalk circle on the ground.
So should we talk about the three nights? Anything in particular you want to say about the first night where she first wakes up. This one is the most low key of the three.
It's the most low key, but it's still plenty spooky again, Like the set is amazing here, that dark, gloomy chapel, full of decay, full of night gallery paintings and candle light and cobwebs, like the gothic grotesque vibe here is just so rich. And when she starts rising, it's very much what you'd expect, you know, the slow rising of the corpse. But it's highly effective, Like it would be a highly effective theme, it would be a highly effective scene.
Rather if this were the only night we had in the film.
Yeah, And of course Coma is saved by the cock crowing, so he draws the magic circle and she gets out of the casket and she's trying to find him. She's like feeling around on the outside of the magic circle, almost like it's an invisible cylinder that goes up to the ceiling. You see her feeling around on the on the wall. Again. I mentioned earlier that she does things physically that feel almost like mime work, like comedy mimework, and this is one example, when she's feeling the unseen wall.
Oh before she even rises. Though, there's a moment I absolutely loved where we get a we essentially we get a jump scare, but without you know, all the bells and whistles of a modern jump scare that can feel a bit get a bit more gimmicky in some cases. But here we get, on one hand, something we're used to have.
What do you have?
You have a black cat dart across the screen? Sure, and maybe a musical note to sort of drive it home. Here we get that, but we get not one black cat, but four of them at once, with the chapel in the chapel, which you know, it does make you logically like, how many cats live in this church? How many are necessary?
It's like they're just feral cats everywhere. Maybe so, But also I just love that as a modern viewer of horror cinema, in any film that just wants to get a jump out of you, we're used to the black cat running across the screen. Here we get four of them, and somehow it being four of them. Yeah, it just works better, like it feels more like an omen like there's numerical data there.
You know, that's all right? I mean the cats usually run together like that, I don't know, usually we're being herded.
Yeah, I mean, cats will live together, but you know, generally it's in films it's just one running across the screen, jumping out of a closet, and we'll see more of the cat antics and subsequent scenes totally.
And this scene also is the first time we see the ghost, or not the ghost, the body of the witch doing that kind of rapid bouncing up and down, shivering, jittering thing. Yeah, which is again looks almost funny, but stays on the line of creepy. I think. So. The second night is the night when she starts piloting her coffin like a spaceship to ram into the sides of this invisible cylinder.
That's right. She awakens in the casket as before, but then the casket takes to the air and we begin to get these zooming, spinning sequences where she's flying in the casket, eventually kind of almost surfing on the casket like surfing ussr here, but again so beautifully executed, like they're using wires here to create this effect.
The room.
They may be using a spinning room as well of some sort. There's so much richness here to discuss here. Even in the first night, when the cock crows, I believe like she kind of glides back into the casket. Do you remember a verse footage effect. Yeah, yeah, and some sort of Dolly system was in play.
I think.
So this is just amazing, just terrifying, with the sense that this is a spirit that is just growing more powerful night by night, and he is barely able to protect himself like that, this magic circle is barely holding.
I wonder if the reverse footage backwards climb back into the coffin in this movie inspired the similar effect that is used in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. Where do you remember when the vampire of Lucy? I think it is she like reversed footages into her coffin.
Oh, I would bet there's a very strong chance of that.
Yeah, I be's I was gonna say scorsesey, that's not Scorsese. I bet Copola is a fan of this movie.
Probably, yeah, yeah, how could you not be?
Okay? And then finally we get to the Third Night, the third the Big Haunt, the Big Deal. This is where everything, all hell breaks loose quite literally.
Yeah, this sequence has it all like it is just the gates of hell have opened, and we get all manner of supposedly ghosts and wear wolves and vampires, but nothing. I don't know. The creatures look more ghoul like to me. You know, there are a lot of the maciated bald creatures that are humanoid, some tall, some very short, dressed in rags. They feel like they have very much climbed out of the grave. They've climbed out of the walls. They've come out of the floor. We get a dancing skeleton,
which is nice. We get giant ghost hands rising up out of the.
Floor, and then in many forms actually just oh yeah, we.
Also just get hands coming out.
Yeah, hands coming out of the walls and out of the altar, I think, and then giant hands surrounding coma.
There's some sort of a weird puppet at one point that I'm not sure what it's supposed to be, but it's it's like, I don't know, a muppet from hell and you're just like job dropping.
The skeletal giraffe with seven heads.
Well there's that, Yes, I've forgot about that. But there's some other kind of creature that nasty kitty cat. Yeah, yeah, it kind of a spines on its spines on its head. That So there's just sights and sounds well beyond anything you've experienced before.
Now you've seen monsters that have more eyes than a human usually has, they've got extra eyes. You've seen monsters with extra arms and legs. Have you ever seen monsters with extra noses? We got that.
Right, We get the guy that has kind of a reminds me of various bat species where they have like very extravagant nostrils. Yeah, we get that guy. Absolutely. The makeup work here is amazing, the.
Rows of nostrils with these naked, wretched revenants and gray zombies. And meanwhile, we've just got the witch in the background. She's there's so much hate in her voice. She's saying, I summon vampires. I summoned were wolves. That's the translation whatever it is she's saying in the original, And one of the words is verdil ox. And I thought interesting that the beasts of hell here are all very gray. They are they seem like dust and cobwebs incarnate.
Yeah, yeah, like this is not Yeah, this is not like a fiery Christian hell that these creatures are emerging from. It's some sort of a gray necropolis or something, you know, some sort of a gray void deep in the earth.
Yeah, a gloomy, gloomy pit. Yeah, and one thing I brought this up earlier, the so the church's religious murals and paintings of saints and things are now changed into demons during the Yeah, and I was wondering, is this an alteration or a revelation? Is the nighttime transformation changing a normally holy place into an unholy place? Or is it revealing something about this place? Is this an unholy place that in the daytime is disguised.
Hmmm, that's a great point. Yeah, what is the connection between this supernatural world it is now descending on him and the super natural world that is part of the Christian faith during the daylight? Is it the same world? And it's just depends on what the lights you're doing. I don't know.
I mean I asked that in part about whether this there's something actually deeper that's wrong with this place because of a few things that are hinted in parts we haven't really talked about, like during the daytime when Koma is here at this compound, at the Suttnix compound, he for example, here's the people talking about stories of witchcraft, like about the huntsman who lived here, who was ridden like a horse by the witch, by the daughter and
then there's also a thing with remember the scene where Coma goes to the girl's father and he's like, no, I'm out. I don't care. You got to do whatever you want. I'm just done. I'm not going back in there. Your daughter is a witch, her soul is in hell. And the guy doesn't react like, I don't know what you're talking about. He reacts almost like like I know
she's in hell. You've got to save her. Like he reacts as if he knows that there is already witchcraft and evil infusing this place and it's not a surprise to him.
Yeah, and that this this thing just has to be done, like there's not really a sense that this will really generate any kind of favorable outcome for anybody. But it's like you you have you do what you are here for. You have to complete your job. You have to make it through the third night. And then on top of this, he tells him like, yeah, if you do this, you'll get a thousand gold coins, but if you don't, you'll get a thousand lashes, And he goes into detail about
how good his guys are at lashing. He's like, I mean, it's it's really really frightening because he's telling them like, they're going to start lashing you, then they're going to get drunk, and then they're going to keep lashing you. Yes, and so like really he's presenting like the prisoning heaven in hell here in a very secular sense. It's like, you can either get beat to death or you can go off with a nice fat pot of money. But but you know those are your choices. And so he's
he is finally like dragged into the church. He's like, I'm gonna be rich when I get out of here. And of course I think we the viewers know at that point he's never getting out of here.
Yeah, he is doomed. But how in what form does that doom come? Why? It is the entrance of V.
Mmm.
So finally, the witch in this last haunting calls out, bring v She says, bring him here, bring V. So in walks this creature, this again gray, the same color palette as the rest of these beings of hell. Uh. He is a thundering, lumbering, stomping gray mass that has something of a rock elemental about him. He seems like
he's made of rock or earth. No arms, just hands in the shoulders, eyes like mud or not eyes, eyelids like mud flaps covering up his eyes, and then he has to have these other zombies raise his eyelids for him. It approaches and it says, you know, raise my eyelids, and so the creatures bring up its eyelids and then its eyes are like gems, sort of like emeralds or like a textured green glass glowing, and the monsters descend
on Coma while the witch laughs. There's something about the gaze of the v and then he points a finger at Coma that enables the monsters to destroy Comas maybe like maybe this overcomes the protection of his magic circle or something like that.
I'm not sure, yeah, yeah, And again this reminds me of Baler, the King of the Fomorians and Irish myth with the deathly gaze beneath the overhanging brow.
But after Coma has been has been rent to death by these creatures, the cock crows a second time. The cock actually crows before he dies, but they ignore it the first time. Second time, they can't withstand the break of morning, so the monsters scamper back. But because they ignored the first crow of the cock, they get caught a little bit late getting back into hell, and so they like, we see these monsters getting stuck in the walls. Actually, here, if you don't mind, I'd like to read a passage
from the Go Gol story. This is from the translation by Richard Pevier and Larissa Volokonski. They translate quote, A cock crow rang out. This was already the second cock crow the gnomes had missed the first. The frightened spirits rushed pell Mell for the windows and doors in order to fly out quickly, but nothing doing, and so they stayed there, stuck in the doors and windows. When the priest came in, he stopped at the sight of such disc grace in God's sanctuary and did not dare serve
a pinakita in such a place. So the church remained forever with monsters stuck in its doors and windows, overgrown with forest roots, weeds, wild blackthorn, and no one now can find the path to it. The movie does this too. It actually catches the monsters frozen halfway going into the walls, and we see them kind of collapse with their body like a leg sticking out or the upper body just hanging there in the wall, still there when the priests come in in the morning, and I love that part.
In fact, there's one thing we didn't even mention. When the monsters are first coming out, there's this marvelous special effect that somehow makes it look like it's like an optical illusion that makes it look like the monsters are crawling out from the middles of the walls. What it actually is is, I think that part of the wall is sort of advanced ahead of the other part of the wall, and there these gaps of depth so that
they can crawl out from in between these parts. But yeah, it's it's very very cool.
Yeah, it is just absolutely a special effects bonanza and just highly effective, very creepy. If if you have any knowledge of this film, again, you have probably seen clips from this part of the movie, or you've you've just seen images from it, because of course one of that the central images is when V comes out. They bring thee out, like you said, the unshielding of the eyes,
And yeah, V is marvelous, great mysterious monster. We want to know more, but it's we were not meant to know anything of him.
In the Actually I can read the description of V that is also in that translation of the story, because I think this is kind of interesting. So the in the story, the witch calls out, bring V, go get the V, and then it says quote, And suddenly there was silence in the church. The wolves howling could be heard far away, and soon heavy footsteps rang out in the church. With a sidelong glance, he saw them leading in some squat hefty splay footed man. He was black
earth all over. His earth covered legs and arms stuck out like strong, sinewy roots. Heavily he trod, stumbling all the time. His long eyelids were lowered to the ground. With horror, Coma noticed that the face on him was made of iron. He was brought in under the arms and put right by the place where Coma stood. Lift my eyelids, I can't see, V said in a subterranean voice. And the entire host rushed to lift his eyelids. And I'll just finish this part. Don't look, some inner voice
whispered to the philosopher. He could not help himself, and looked there he is. V cried and fixed an iron finger on him, and all that were there fell upon the philosopher. Breathless, he crashed to the ground, and straightway the spirit flew out of him in terror.
Oh wow, so v it really almost had you already mentioned that he has like an elemental vibe, but in the original text almost sounds a little bit like almost manufactured, like like he is a like a the end product of some sort of strange hurricane right where something or somebody is transformed into the v.
It describes his face and his finger as iron, and it describes his arms and legs as like roots and black soil.
Yeah, pretty groovy, Pretty groovy, but not so for Coma because com again is struck dead by this.
Yeah uh yeah. So then, of course, as we said, after this, we go back to the university and we just check in with the other oaths, the other guys there who are you know, we're his friends. They're probably thinking about something they can steal later today, and they're and they're doing their pain, and they're like, yeah, whatever happened to Coma? Too bad about him. He was a nice guy.
It's interesting this little epilogue because it's certainly not a send them home happy sort of tack on ending like we see in some older horror films, though there is perhaps a sense of, well, we can't end it on such a dark note as well, you know, we have to let that. I think another part of it might be, Okay, we just had this amazing special effects sequence. Maybe the audience needs to breathe a little bit, They need to
catch their breath before they can leave the theater. And we just have these two seminarians setting around ignoring their duties, drinking vodka and again eating what I assume to be like green onions.
Yeah, too bad for coma munch, munch, give me some ramps.
Okay, then, but then the credits roll and the credits are a little creepy again, we get some more cop.
Webbed so yeah so I yeah, that does it for me. Those are my thoughts on V.
V is pretty great. Highly recommend it. If you haven't seen it, go see it. And if you need to revisit it, yeah go do so. We spelled all the different ways you can go and see it these days. I would love to hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts on this film and also just its legacy, and if you've seen any other cinematic adaptations of V I would love to hear about you, hear your thoughts on those because we just briefly touched on I think
a nineteen oh nine possibly lost film. I don't know that it remains. A lot of those old silent films did not make it. But then there are other productions from throughout the decades. There's one that's completely at least one that's completely animated. And then you have these more
recent like Blockbuster Russian Blockbuster treatments. Right in if you've seen them, I think they've they've They've been streaming on some major platforms before, so some of you may have seen those, and you can write in and tell us what's what's that flavor, like, how did that Blockbuster adaptation go?
Huge thing? Access always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow Yourmind dot com.
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