Dark Fantasy With Really Cold Weather: Russian Horror (part 1)

It took a while, but my survey of Russian horror is finally (mostly) complete. I didn’t intend for it to take so long, but Russian horror isn’t exactly easy to come by. 

There isn’t much written about it, and there is so very little Russian horror as it turns out. I almost gave up, to be honest. I feel like the hobbits returning to the Shire. But after paying a handsome sum to an old nun with a wooden leg and the monkey stopped giving me trouble, I was able to finally watch them for myself. 

Those Russians might finally be turning the tables recently, but it turns out that, up until the 1980’s, only one bonafide horror film was made in Russia. Just one. That’s pretty crazy when you think about it. But don’t take to Twitter and complain just yet. There’s a reason.

Russian cinema has traditionally been a late-starter during every major era. The first Russian film was made in 1908, long after trick films and chase films had already become staples elsewhere. 

It wasn’t until the first World War when the Russian film industry was finally making mostly Russian films, more than any time before or since. And for the next decade or two, Russian filmmakers were doing some crazy stuff. 

Like, I dunno, inventing the concept of montage. Explaining the mechanics of editing. Kuleshov. Kino-eye. You get the picture (no pun intended).

So the legacy of Russian cinema is well-established, but what about Russian horror? Why are there no zombies or space monsters or even ghost stories in Russia? You would think that horror would be a fitting genre for a culture known for its brooding and anxious nature.

Sorry to bother you. We're just looking for your horror movies.

Well, the main reason is politics. 

Because Soviet-era art was restricted to the ideology of atheistic, Marxist materialism, it didn’t leave much room for horror at all. Anything that made reference to the supernatural was off limits, as was pretty much any notion of the uncanny. 

Horror is also very personal, and includes attacks on the body and, in general, invasions of personal space. That is why so many horror stories feature domestic spaces like homes, bedrooms, bathrooms, schools, etc. But in Soviet Russia, the concept of personal space just didn’t exist, or at least wasn’t acknowledged publicly. 

It's just one song. Call Me Maybe... you heard it? Let me just
play it for you once. Just once, I promise. Oh come on.

Marxist materialism also didn’t have much room for the irrational in general, including abnormal psychology. Horror often features themes of insanity, depression, anxiety, paranoia, etc. To a Bolshevik, this would hardly be fit for entertainment. Horror also thrives on the imminence of uncontrollable chaos (think zombies), and to the order-loving Soviet mentality, this is also counter-productive.

But having said all that, the new film industry in Russia is a lot more like the one that existed before the Revolution. It is more Westernized, and every effort is being made to get Russians a seat at the world table. A lot of countries are doing this, actually, particularly in Asia. 

Be like Hollywood long enough to build your industry, then start telling your stories. It makes good economic sense, and it’s working. Just look at Hong Kong.

One of the first big blockbusters in post-Soviet Union Russia was, in fact, a horror movie. You might say they are gearing up for some really interesting changes in aesthetics, and I’m anxious as hell to see it. 

In Part 1, I’m just looking at the big-budget, mainstream films of the last decade. And get excited, because a few of them are in English. 

Night Watch (2004) and Day Watch (2006)

Subgenres: Dark Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Action

Night Watch and Day Watch tell the stories of two races of beings that once were at war with one another, but declared a truce that has lasted quite a long time. They have to keep each other from eating the humans, and an awful lot of effort is spent to convince one boy that he should be on one side or the other. 

It starts with a morally shocking opener: the protagonist paying a witch to curse his wife who is pregnant with another man’s child, and cause her to miscarry so that she doesn’t have to divorce him. That's pretty messed up, so already, we're into some really weird, moral territory. Some of the places the film goes from there are quite interesting, but the story suffers from being so damn confusing at times. 

The premise may be pretty straightforward, but the plot is a mess. In Ebert’s review of Night Watch, he wrote, “those who understand the plot of Night Watch should forget about the movies and get right to work on string theory.” That about sums it up, unfortunately.

But perhaps that’s not fair. The films suffer from being too many things at once. They’re not trying to be that original, at least not in the sense of doing anything new. It borrows from the Matrix, Star Wars, classic German horror films and many others. The plot is indeed exceedingly confusing, but the fun is in seeing Russian filmmakers show us what they are capable of. 

If you watch this movie, though, expect a somewhat mediocre story, with a few fun and memorable moments. The part involving something called the Gloom is really creepy and fun, as is the swirly vortex of literal chaos surrounding a woman that is cursed with bad luck. 

Not really that scary, because it’s more of an action-thriller with some horror-elements, but it’s a good throwaway popcorn flick. 

Viy (2014)
Subgenres: Dark Fantasy, Religious, Witchcraft

This move is a remake of the one and only Soviet-era horror film of the same name (which I will talk about in Part 2). The 2014 version is also loosely based on Nikolai Gogol's folk tale, though it is much more modernized. 

In fact, this movie tells a story that is very similar to the story of Russia's film industry. It begins with an Englishman that is sent into the East to map the territory, and he finds a small village that seems to be straight out of a storybook. Everyone in this town is predisposed to finding evil everywhere, not realizing they they, themselves, are being used as instruments of some devilish influence that seems to prefer things stay this way. 

You might say that this arrangement recalls the conditions for Soviet-era filmmakers that had to enlighten an audience that didn't want to be enlightened. There is such an atmosphere of fear and paranoia that Salem-esque scenario doesn't seem that far-fetched. 

The original plot involving a monk that reluctantly prays for three nights over a witch's body only takes up about twenty minutes of this film. The rest of the film is like all of the hypothetical stuff that might have led to the need for such a ritual to even happen. There are some truly scary parts of this film, mostly in the middle. Actually, though it is very rare to say, this is a film where the middle is probably the strongest. The exposition in the beginning is slow and sometimes confusing, and the ending might strike some viewers as being at best anti-climactic, and at worst cheating. 

This feels more like a Pirates of the Carribean film, with a little Pan's Labyrinth thrown in. My experience might have also been aided by a better translation, because the version I watched was badly subtitled, and even had some Russian dubbed over parts of the film that were clearly in English. Which reminds me: Tywin Lannister is in this movie (for all you GOT fans). 

Devil’s Pass

Subgenres: Found Footage, Survival, Sci-Fi

This might be the most fun I’ve had watching a found footage film. The Blair Witch Project had a good story, but wasn’t that scary, and it was nauseating to watch. A lot of found footage films are nauseating to watch, but this one really wasn’t. 

In Russia, there was a famous story involving the death of a group of hikers in the Northern Ural Mountains, in a place known as Devil’s Pass. This movie is the found footage recovered from some American film students that set out to investigate the disappearance on their own.

Now, if you can get over the premise of some unknown filmmakers from America going to ground zero of the Russian equivalent of Area 51, and you accept that, then this will be be a very enjoyable film for you. Get over that hump, and you’re there.

The characters are drawn very well, each with a distinct personality, and they are introduced to us in very interesting ways. One of them is seen for the first time while sitting in front of his editing station, hitting the space bar to play clips from an interview with a woman that is giving us the official story of what happened at Devil’s Pass. It cuts back and forth between her comments and his, conveying not just the information for the plot, but also tells us a good deal about him. This sort of scene also tells viewers like yours truly that they don’t intend to waste my time. I kinda like that.

From a found footage film standpoint, the film sticks to convention, but is smoother around the edges. For instance, the leader of the project is unsurprisingly accused of being the author of some of the hijinks that ensue, and it is believed that she is creating them on purpose for the film. Not an original trope, but it’s very effective.

This is a found footage film in which the footage is (thankfully, for a change) shot in HD. No more graininess or artifacts to add to the nausea. The locations in this film are really very beautiful, and watching it, you almost forget it’s a found footage film until the moments between takes when the characters speak candidly. 

It’s hard to tell a suspenseful story without at least some physical action, and revealing that action in a found footage film is a delicate balance. On the one hand, there’s the frustrating, migraine-inducing visual chaos that is the most likely real-life result of a camera operator trying not to get eaten, and on the other, the careful staging of the camera so that we see who gets eaten. If that sounds challenging, that’s because it totally is.

It’s also a challenge to explain why we’re seeing what we’re seeing, when most people would just turn the damn camera off. It’s what I would do if I was in a situation where I might get eaten, but that's just me.

The movie gets pretty scary in the second half, and it had a very satisfying ending for me, especially considering the fact that found footage films are notorious for having terrible endings. Can you name a found footage film that had a satisfying ending? The Blair Witch Project just sort of ends. Same thing with Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield. No ending.

So I definitely recommend this film. It doesn’t hit every note, but the finished song is more impressive than what has come before it.

I wish I could recommend the rest of these, but I don't really think I can. But in case they're your cup of tea...

Captivity 

Subgenres: Survival, Suspense, Body

I loved the look of this movie, with its gold and red palette, but not much else at all. Get a pretty American girl and put her into an unbelievable scenario that fails to create tension and, at least for this reviewer, has one of the most disappointingly predictable endings. It is in English, though, and you may like it if you like movies like Hostel. It’s pretty straighforward, but nothing to write home about.

Phobos - Club of Fear

Subgenres: Survival, Paranormal

This film chooses an amazing location in which to tell the story, but then it deprives the audience for a full hour of any action whatsoever. It fails to raise any stakes or give us any scares at all, then undermines the whole thing with a terrible ending. The WWII-era backdrop could have made this film promising, had it been better written and at least competently executed. Watch if you liked Final Destination, but don’t expect it to be as good.

Trackman

Subgenres: Slasher, Thriller, Survival

Another story that takes place in a great location and even has a promising and simple scenario, but it goes absolutely nowhere. The scenario involving some bank robbers at the mercy of a giant maniac in a subterranean sewer system eventually takes us through tedium and farce until we at last are rooting for the Trackman to just kill the characters already. It’s never a good sign when the villain is accidentally the good guy.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where I'll discuss some of the more artistic and underground horror films in Russia.

Skyline: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Hollywood

This review contains many spoilers, but I promise you, it won't matter. :)

I didn’t really go into this movie expecting much, but like a moth to a light, I got sucked in. It wasn’t until I left the theater, feeling quite dirty and ashamed, that the point had been made. I had been through a struggle, much like my beloved protagonist. I watched his face closely like all the others, in painful anticipation that one of them would at last spit out the line of dialogue that might finally provide the context I needed to understand what I was seeing. I endured to the bitter end, waiting with anxious unease for the vindication of my desire. I waited for someone to get to the point.

The movie opens with a hook: some lights outside, an earthquake, some dude in his underwear starts turning into a zombie, then… the movie dies for a while. Like another very trying television show I won’t mention, the film timeshifts to 15 hours previously to deliver what I was hoping would turn out to be relevant information. I was optimistic though, so I reached out to my dear screen-friends. They were pretty, after all, and I couldn’t just go and not be empathetic to pretty people. And look! They’re having a pool party, too! That’s pretty awesome, I guess.

But as I sat there in my mental bathing suit, pretending that the banality I was hearing was actually Kerouac, trying REAL hard not to impose – because that would be dreadful rude – I indulged their LA appetites. I went along with the crowd, but only because I really was concerned about my buddy, Jarrod. He’s not quite sure he wants to move to LA yet. Hey, that’s something I can get with, so he mustn’t be all that bad.

Then I found out he knocked up Elaine. That’s kind of personal, so I must be connecting with her, too. Man, this film is awesome! We got a guy who’s maybe got a job in LA doing some computery thing, and he’s going to be a father with someone who maybe doesn’t like LA so much. Ok.

Then, back to the lights.

“Wait!” I said, perhaps a bit too loudly in the theater. “Aren’t we going to get to know the other guys?” (I thought it prudent to whisper this last part, for there may have been some present who had no problem with the story) In fact, I thought, we didn’t really get to know Buddy Jarrod or his old lady all that well either. And now the aliens are going to come and take them away from me? This, I believed at first, was the point of the movie: There are ugly things that will rip away your friends before you fully get to know them. With this in mind, I trudged on.

Some guy got sucked out of the room toward the blinding light and a girl screamed. After that, Buddy Jarrod started to go all zombie again, but thankfully, the light stopped. Not much of an explanation was given for why it happened in this manner, but I assumed there was a reason. I thought maybe Buddy Jarrod was special. Maybe that is why he and the Black Guy have a gun. You must be special if you think a handgun will save you from Ginormous Alienfuckball.

But then an interesting part came: Buddy Jarrod and Black Guy see thousands of people being sucked into the big blue Thing. I found this quite frustrating because the camera didn’t really slow down long enough for me to see anyone’s faces! I kept thinking, “Wait, I might know one of them!” I mean, I have dozens of friends who now live in LA, and I have to know if they’re ok. I guess in retrospect, I only wanted to be able to emphathize with these poor souls, but they seemed more like, well, moths. And who cares when a moth flies into a buglamp, really? The aliens were ripping people away, alright, but they weren’t people from MY life. So actually, not that scary.

But they did start going after Buddy Jarrod and Black Guy shortly after and they almost got ‘em. Here, the aliens acted quite strangely, though. Something about their movements seemed off, but I assumed that I was just reading into it and dismissed it. They were saved, at last, by Pretty Elaine, who opened the door that conveniently locked our heroes on the roof. In doing so, she conveniently looked into the lights of the squid thing and started to conveniently turn zombie. I realized later that the reason for her to do this was so that we, the audience, could have a poet explain to us the awesome power of this strange magnetic light: “It was like being pulled by something. And the light, it was so beautiful.”

Alright, maybe not that poetic, but these are my friends. Maybe they aren’t ahhtists, but perhaps they are more like engineering-types. Yeah, that means they’ll come up with something clever. I’m gonna ride with them and see what they come up with.

Brother Jarrod speaks: “They’re not near the water; we should go to the marina and get a boat and get out of here.” Ok, I’m inspired by his optimism. Because, after all, what would that take? They mentioned it being ten blocks away. That’s probably half an hour to an hour on foot – assuming all other forms of transportation would attract far too much attention. You would probably go at night to avoid being seen, and take the back alleys. But even as easy peasy as that sounds, how do you know those big floating squid monsters are impervious to the air above the water? And where would it take you that is safe? Perhaps you would swim, say to an island? It wouldn’t be fun, but it would save your ass, right? Assuming the aquaphobic alien theory is correct.

So, they pile into their convertibles and high-tail it out of –

Wait, what?

Man, the black guy didn’t have to die! Why did you take cars? And in the broad daylight? And with the top down? This sucks. I liked him.

Oh well. I realized that the Ugly Things Will Rip Your Black Friends Away Theory was probably not the real point of the movie, because this situation was easily avoidable.

Then, enter Angel. I don’t remember his real name, but I recognize him as that smooth-talking, kind-hearted detective from Dexter. He won me over, not just by saving Jarrod and Elaine’s beautiful butts, but by just looking like Angel. I didn’t have to get to know him, because I already KNEW him. It was like going to class for the first time in high school and feeling all alone, and then realizing that someone you know is in the same class with you. And this guy is gonna be with me and Buddy Jarrod until the very last blue light goes out. This'll be awesome! With another shot of adrenaline to my poor, aching heart, I sat up and readied myself with some popcorn for the next episode in the Pretty People saga.

After a while, the popcorn started to taste funny and a queasy feeling started to set in. I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but it went away immediately when the fighter jets arrived. Almost like the movie could see the precursors of the thought, “why is nothing happening?” before I could formulate the thought, the military showed up. I was at first sour to think that the military would be a lame cop-out for a movie with such beautiful people, but their fighter jets looked pretty sweet.

I don’t know how Buddy Jarrod knew which jet had the nuke, but together we watched it fly to the mother ship and drop its payload, and the most miraculous thing happened: Buddy Jarrod and his friends were not affected by the explosion at all. This is the point at which I began to question my assumption of the film’s purpose.

I was beginning to think that maybe Jarrod was getting a lot of freebies, given how little progress he had made towards advancing a goal of any kind. I was starting to see that his friends would begin suffering for his inadequacies and his utter cowardice, and so I formed a new theory: Make friends with the military. It’s not implausible that the purpose of this film would be to raise enlistment levels. And if Monsters come out of the sky to suck your brains out, you’re gonna want some muscle, no?

So I waited for the military to give Soldier Jarrod some orders to make him, uh, useful. I even imagined a downed soldier saying something like, “…must…blow…arc…reactor…” and then handing him some funny-looking but probably expensive device which he would no doubt be able to use because of his computery skills (that is what exposition is for, anyways). But this moment did not come.

Instead, the giant bipedal beasties destroyed every soldier that came on screen. Even the ones on the roof.* As well, the mother ship which was downed by the nuke had somehow, by powers that go just as unexplained as the mothlight powers, reconstructed itself. The military seems quite as useless and incapable here as That Chick That Was With Them At One Point. The only one that ends up DOING anything is Angel, who kills himself trying to do it. Now that’s not very productive. It’s hard to fight off an invasion, what with the whole being dead thing. And he wasn’t really successful, either.

So imagine my frustration. I had come, at last, to the climax of this journey with my pretty new friends; I had laughed and cried, and been through the depths of despair; yet I still didn’t know what the goddam point was! Why am I in this story? AM I in this story? And if I am, does this story have an end? May we get there, please?

But then, I realized those funny movements the aliens were making earlier on the roof, and the movements they made whenever Buddy Jarrod and his better half were on the screen. Watching Jarrod fistfight a squid monster to defend his girl, I knew: They were protected by a Third-Act Forcefield. The Third Act Forcefield is that wonderful device which means the hero will never have to confront the villain until the third act. The villain must always remain JUST weak and slow enough to get us to the end.

As if responding to the other part of my brain that thought of this, one part said, “well great, but that doesn’t explain why we must care.” And the response: “maybe we will be given a reason shortly.” “You lie,” quipped the first. Had I not been drawn to the flickering screen, I might have found more interest in this inner dialogue. This was the climax, you see, and all kinds of flashy lights (albeit not Beautiful Blue) were sucking me in. And before I realized that the hero and his heroine had given up, the movie turned from a comedy into a dark horror movie.

I still don’t know how it happened, but before I knew it, the only people I cared about – who I stopped caring about – were now trapped in some hellish chamber. The heroine wakes up and finds the bodies of those near her being snatched up by giant mechanical arms, their skulls crushed with a chomp, their brains sucked out and spit into a tube of goo, and their bodies tossed into a blue vat. She looks around, hearing the chomping, one by one, of her compatriots, as the arms draw closer to her. She is surrounded by newly created monsters who are receiving new brains as if on an assembly line, and they stomp on by. And at last, Buddy Jarrod is taken from her, and his skull crushed, his body thrown aside. This is the end.

Actually, I thought this is when the film just started getting good. You take the most annoying sorority girl, dim-witted from head to toe, and toss her into this mess, and you bet your ass you’ll get some sympathy from me. But at least in movies like The Human Centipede, you only have to endure about twenty or thirty minutes with the most unsympathetic characters before they start to get real sympathetic real quick.

And so, in the final five minutes of the film, the point seems quite clear to me: Fuck Hollywood.

No, let me clarify that. That sounds cheap, but let me explain. What we have here are people who go to LA and wind up getting sucked into a machine that literally turns them into bio-mechanical robots that go out and do the same thing to everyone they can find. Their only strength seems to be size and a certain knack for wielding arresting amounts of flashy lights. If anyone even thinks of fighting back, they’re gonna find themselves with a squidy up their ass in no time. The worst weapons we can think of cannot bring the beast down, even when we ask the government to step in. They just rebound, and keep on making the lights happen.

In case you haven’t caught the drift, I’m talking about Hollywood itself. Being a filmmaker, I know an awful lot about the machine that is Hollywood, and how no one is going to crash THAT party. If you think you’re just going to go to Hollywood and change the game and start making art, think again. What they care about is the flashy lights, because that is all cinema is to them.

It is for this reason that I felt so dirty leaving the theater after seeing this movie. This film was never attempting to tell a story or generate any kind of emotion from me other than, perhaps, infatuation. Infatuation leads to dollars. But today, they just want our dollars, tomorrow, they may want our minds. Some may say the want this, too. Advertisers would certainly agree that your thoughts have monetary value.

And so, saving the most horrifying elements for the moment after the mothlight has trapped the heroine – this says to me that this film COULD have been an awesome movie. If there was some sort of a “fear of fatherhood” statement to be made here that might introduce some sort of human element, it was lost on me until the final moments. There certainly seems to be in the end, since Beastie Jarrod saves Pretty Elaine from becoming Beastie Elaine.

I don’t think the makers of this film intended any of this, but nevertheless, it’s what I get out of it. I have looked into the light and come out on the other side. I have seen the existential horror that is Hollywood, forever destroying all that is beautiful by directing our attentions towards that which endeavors to consume us.

But at least they are not destroying pretty people.

*At what point does a building collapse under the weight of a monster of the same size? Go back and watch this and tell me what you come up with, because I was sure those buildings were coming down at some point.