THE SAVAGE HUNT OF KING STAKH
Dir. Valeri Rubinchik, 1980
Belarus. 134 min

"This is a horrible, damned house."

Welcome to Marsh Firs, the gothic mansion at the center of a bloody folktale that a young ethnographer has come to collect. Shortly after his arrival, the erudite skeptic finds himself an unwitting witness to the Wild Hunt, a trope common in Eastern European folklore, lead by the ghost of a vengeful nobleman killed at the mansion while there as a guest hundreds of years prior. But the Wild Hunt may be the least of his worries during his stay with the estate’s unstable mistress who unveils more about her family’s past and the menagerie of ghosts that haunt them.

A rare contribution to the horror genre from Soviet cinema, THE SAVAGE HUNT OF KING STAKH was recently restored by Deaf Crocodile in 2023. Leave your jump-scares at home and settle in for the horrors of paranoia and psychological torture.