|Benjamin Desbois|
Viy plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, October 23, through Sunday, October 25. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
He was nine feet tall and his name was Darryl. Made mostly of paper mache and chicken wire, he weighed about 40 pounds. Wood planks ran down his spine and were attached to a backpack-like harness of bike tires and wood built into his large ogre belly. Controls to move his head and articulate his jaw were attached to the harness, and a megaphone was mounted to the inside of his bulbous stomach.
Images of Darryl return to me as I watch Viy. The film relies heavily on surreal, phantasmagoric elements, and a giant ogre would fit right in. The film is an interpretation of an old Nikolai Gogol tale that draws heavily on local folklore. It is the tale of a haunting that occurs over the course of three nights. Each night the terror and demonic apparitions ratchet up until the final night when the Viy, a fiendish monster with all-seeing eyes, is summoned by a witch. The Viy itself is large, and ogreish with unique eyelids that hang down to protect its incredible eyes.
Darryl kind of reminds me of the Viy. His imposing, triple-nippled ogre torso ended with a large array of tasseled and frayed fabric akin to a kilt or skirt of rags. Then, below, my own spindly legs stuck out where they became Darryl’s legs. From the inside, he was mostly treacherous ends of chicken wire and hot paper mache, but from the outside he looked like a nine-foot ogre with a crooked grin. He looked like a cross between Jabba the Hutt and Shrek dressed up for the May Day Parade. He was grotesque, campy, and fabulous.
The witch portrayed in Viy is also a mix of grotesque and fabulous. Her figure transforms from old to young and back to old. At times she is played by a young woman and at other times by a middle-aged man. She soars around in a coffin. The young woman who portrays her, Natalya Varley, also does some impressive mime work when a holy forcefield impedes her. The film manages to terrify and delight with its campy horror.
Darryl was a final project for a college puppetry course, and we wanted him to be terrifying, hence the size and the megaphone. With limited resources, we had to get creative in how to make him imposing. Once constructed, we took him on a December walk across the University of Minnesota campus. I should not have worn pants, but it was cold, so I kept my jeans on; in the pictures that have survived, you can see my blue jeans poking out of the bottom of Darryl’s skirt- decidedly not scary.
His stroll around campus pulled students from their mid-winter stupor. Students and faculty were distracted from their troubles as a half-naked, half-jeaned ogre strolled across the Washington Avenue bridge. Through the megaphone, he said hello to people and scared the crap out of a number of folks. In retrospect, his phantasmagoric presence hopefully pulled people from their monotony, from their schoolwork, for at least a moment. The University of Minnesota campus has a massive footprint, and eventually, Darryl (me) got tired so he (me) decided to take the campus commuter bus back to the workshop. Wear and tear accumulated from his trek across campus so that by the time we got back to the workshop, my entire face could be seen through a cantaloupe-sized hole in his stomach. I looked like some alien, fully-formed fetus materializing out of his belly.
What made Darryl wonderful beyond his grotesque and spooky nature was how obvious it was that he was a puppet. He was irrefutably handmade; his indexicality integral to his essence. He was able to bridge the gap between the banality of daily life, the regimented routine and the surreal. He gave people a spark of imagination without completely becoming unfathomable. He wasn’t an actual ogre; he was human-made. There was a creator’s signature, a creator’s hand. Darryl was not the first ever ogre, or even the first ever oversized ogre puppet, but part of his charm was the way he was built the way he was, by two college kids.
On the spectrum of craft, our world is pushing as much as it can to have everything be polished, perfectly produced; without seams, signatures, or evidence of construction. Music is honed and produced to scientific perfection while the majority of mainstream film is generated in front of a green screen. Encouragement and space are rarely given to creators to explore the tangible materials around them, or given permission to make something where you can still see how it was made. Not to say people don’t ever make things by hand anymore or that you can’t find things with beautiful imperfections, but the people who craft those things have to actively push against the onslaught of mass-production and over-polished slop. There’s something magical when you can see the actual thumbprints in the clay of a sculpture or the single wrong note in a song. In a world of ever-increasing AI content, human imperfections and human touches become the currency of true art.
Old movies hold a magic that is rare to find these days, and it’s most pronounced in horror and sci-fi movies, where necessity forced the filmmakers to think outside the box and generate incredible effects with practical materials. There was a theatricality and ingenuity to their creations. How do you make a witch fly or a monster crawl without CGI? A witch needs to ride on a philosopher’s back like he was a horse? We can make that happen. You need a troll-like creature with huge overhanging eyelids to track down that same philosopher? We can make it happen.
More often though, the answer is: we used to make it happen, now we generate something with a computer. It’s so much harder to create camp with a computer. There’s an added dimension to art and expression when you can see people’s creativity in full swing.
Watching Viy today is as much a breath of fresh air as it is entertaining. It captures a magic that can only be made by human hands and human minds. It is a horror film that spirals out into the grotesque, the surreal, and even the ghastly, and it does it through campy use of practical effects, and it’s awesome.
One of the simplest effects used is midway through the film when the witch rides her victim like a horse. The actors are attached to a masked harness and then “run” while a large disc spins beneath them. The camera is set at a low angle to mask the spinning while the silhouetted foliage that passes on the far side of the disc gives the impression of speed.
Many of the creatures in the film are people in masks or latex prosthetics while the Viy itself is a puppet the size of Big Bird. Shutter speed and lighting help emphasize and exaggerate the movements of the actors as they crawl up and down the walls. The film is also full of stop tricks where the filming is paused and the actors hold still while something is added, removed, or altered. When filming recommences the appearance/disappearance is magical, mystifying.
Viy is not the first haunting I’ve ever seen, or the scariest, but like Darryl, it is singular. It manages to weave a classic haunting with traditional folk art and puppetry. The Russian Orthodox Church meets The Muppets. Go see this film; the strangeness embedded in this film will linger with you. Watching it is like watching two stories at once: the story within the film, and the story of the creators’ need to express their own existential questions. Watch a film where people made things. And then they imbued those things with deep meaning in a way that is campy, terrifying, grotesque, historical, and whimsical. Be careful: Viy is a haunting that plays with your mind and you may end up making puppets.
Edited by Finn Odum