Lars Henriks, filmmaker and host of the Mysterium Pictorum (https://www.larshenriks.de/podcast-2) podcast, joins us to explore the first and possibly only horror film made in Russia during the Soviet era: Viy (1967). It's a retelling of Nikolai Gogal's classic but probably fake folktale, which also inspired Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960) and a recent Russian-Chinese CGI-fest that has a sequel starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jackie Chan. No, we're not making that up – Google it! It tells the tale of a feckless seminary student who is called to hold a vigil over the body of a young girl for three nights, during with increasingly terrifying, coffin-surfing things occur to test his faith. Is it a relatively undiscovered jewel of spooky Soviet cinema or an unfathomable unorthodox oddity? Find out!
