Fear Before the Fall: Horror Films in the Late Soviet Union

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This spooky season on Parallax Views, we venture behind the Iron Curtain with historian Alexander Herbert, author of Fear Before the Fall: Horror Films in the Late Soviet Union. Herbert uncovers a hidden world of Soviet horror cinema — films that reflected the fears, contradictions, and collapsing certainties of late socialism.

We talk about Viy (1967), the first officially Soviet horror movie and a chilling adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s tale about a terrified seminarian forced to pray over a witch’s corpse. From there, Herbert explores how later Soviet filmmakers created movies that were either horror or horror-adjacent. It's an exploration of a rather unexplored topic.

It’s a conversation about horror, history, and ideology — and how the Soviet Union’s final decades produced some of the most fascinating and overlooked genre films ever made.

Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio - Track: "Exorcism"