Viy is a 1967 horror film

Horror film

Horror films seek to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres...

 produced by Mosfilm

Mosfilm

Mosfilm is a film studio, which is often described as the largest and oldest in Russia and in Europe. Its output includes most of the more widely-acclaimed Soviet films, ranging from works by Tarkovsky and Eisenstein , to Red Westerns, to the Akira Kurosawa co-production and the epic Война и Мир...

 and based on the Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist and novelist.Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism...

 story of the same name

Viy (story)

"Viy" is a horror short story by the Ukrainian-born Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, first published in the first volume of his collection of tales entitled Mirgorod . The title refers to the name of a demonic entity central to the plot....

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Synopsis

The movie follows the original tale in a somewhat loose fashion, but manages to retain the majority of the images and action.

Plot

A seminary student must survive three nights in prayer guarding the deceased witch maiden while she, along with an army of hellish demons, try to lure him out of his Holy Ring of Chalk

Chalk

Chalk is a soft, white, porous sedimentary rock, a form of limestone composed of the mineral calcite. Calcite is calcium carbonate or CaCO3. It forms under reasonably deep marine conditions from the gradual accumulation of minute calcite plates shed from micro-organisms called coccolithophores....

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Cast

• Leonid Kuravlev as Khoma Brutus
• Natalya Varley
  Natalya Varley
  Natalya Varley is a Soviet and Russian film and theater actress, RSFSR Honoured artist .- Filmography :* The Wizard of Emerald City as Bastinda/Gingema* Guest from the Future as Marta Erastovna* Errors of Youth...
  
   as Pannochka
• Alexei Glazyrin
• Vadim Zakharchenko
• Nikolai Kutuzov
• Pyotr Vesklyarov
• Dmitri Kapka
• Stepan Shkurat
• G. Sochevko
• Nikolai Yakovchenko
• Nikolai Panasyev

Production

Some of the 'witch' scenes and the ending where Viy appears were toned down due to technological limitations as well as then current restrictions on Soviet film production. The directors were able to avoid the previous restrictions by using what was considered a 'folk tale'.

Release

This was officially the first Soviet-era horror film released in the USSR.

Remake

A modern version has been in production for several years and has gone through several different deadlines, but is supposed to be released in 2010. The 1990 Serbian version of the film, called "A Holy Place" will run on the Fantasia Festival

Fantasia Festival

Fantasia International Film Festival is a genre film festival that has been based mainly in Montreal since its founding in 1996...

2010.