In old Russia, a young monk (Leonid Kuravlyov). from the seminary near Kiev has a bizarre encounter with an ancient crone who reveals herself as a witch. After rejecting her aggressive sexual advances and being forced to fly over the countryside with her on his back, the monk compels her to land by invoking the name of Christ and beats the witch to within an inch of her life, at which point she transforms into a beautiful young woman (Natalya Varley).
Freaked out, the monk escapes and returns to the seminary, where he's immediately summoned by the master of the village he just escaped from. Against his will he is tasked with performing a three-day ceremony of last rites for the master's beautiful daughter, for which he is promised a healthy reward of a thousand pieces of gold, but when he arrives to perform the service, the daughter has died and he realizes that she was the which that he brutalized, apparently to her death. As he reluctantly performs the rites, the girl's corpse sits up and flies through the air, basically surfing around the room in her coffin, clearly bewitched or possessed.
The haunting begins.
The experience causes the monk's hair to turn white, and he attempts to bail on the final day of the ritual, but the village master threatens him with a brutal public lashing if he refuses. After a failed attempt at escape, the monk is forced to return and fulfill his obligation. It does not end well for him, as the witch curses him with torment by spirits and demons from Hell.
I'd heard of VIY ("Spirit of Evil") for years and was curious to see it, because I had yet to experience a Russian horror story, so I leapt at the opportunity when I found it online. Adapted from the 1835 novella by Nikolai Gogol, I don't know if it's the film's Soviet-era vintage or if it's a case of cultural disconnect, but I found the film not scary in the least, and even at a short 76 minutes I had a hard time staying awake through it. The supernatural bits are few and far between, with the majority of the running time being devoted to the slow-paced world of the dead witch's peasant village, punctuated by lots of drunken folk singing by the elder village men. The film moves like a drugged tortoise and the spookiest imagery happens during the last ten minutes, by which point it's too little too late, and much of those visuals are about on par with those of a generic carnival spook house.
This one's a disappointing curiosity that I wish I had skipped, but at least I can now cross it off of my list.
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