Leonid
Kuravlev, Natalya Varley, Alexei Glazyrin , Nikolai Kutuzov, Petr
Vesklyarov , Dmitriy Kapka .
This Russian film adaptation of Nikolai
Gogol's story was for a long time the only horror film made in the
Soviet Union. Khoma (Leonid Kuravlev), a young novice, travels across
the countryside and stays for a night in a barn that belongs to
an ugly old woman. When she attacks him at night and takes him for
a broom ride, the scared novice fatally wounds her, and before she
dies, she turns into a beautiful young noblewoman (Natalya Varley).
The latter leaves a will, according to which Khoma should pray for
her for three nights in the chapel until her body is buried. At
night, the witch rises from the coffin and tries to catch Khoma.
She flies around but she can't reach him or see him because he stays
inside the circle that he has drawn around himself. During the third
and last night, the witch makes the last attempt to scare him out
of the circle, and she calls all sorts of ugly creatures to help
her... Gogol wrote several stories based on Ukrainian folklore,
many of them dealing with the Devil and the supernatural. |