THE CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER IN SOVIET HORROR

by

Anastasia Nagornova

A Third Year Research Project in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in and Media Studies at The School of Advanced Studies University of

June 2020 МИНИСТЕРСТВО НАУКИ И ВЫСШЕГО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ Федеральное государственное автономное образовательное учреждение высшего образования «ТЮМЕНСКИЙ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ УНИВЕРСИТЕТ»

ШКОЛА ПЕРСПЕКТИВНЫХ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ (SAS) ТЮМГУ

Директор Школы к.ф.н., Ph.D. А.В. Щербенок

КУРСОВАЯ РАБОТА

СОВЕТСКИЕ ФИЛЬМЫ УЖАСОВ: КОНСТРУИРОВАНИЕ ГЕНДЕРА

42.03.05 Медиакоммуникации

Выполнила работу Студентка 3-ого курса Нагорнова Анастасия Валерьевна Очной формы обучения

Руководитель Щербенок Андрей Валерьевич PhD, к.ф.н.

Тюмень 2020 3

DECLARATION OF ORIGINALITY By submitting this research project, I hereby certify that: I am its sole author and that any ideas, techniques, quotations, or any other material from the work of other people included in my research project, published or otherwise, are fully acknowledged in accordance with the standard referencing practices of my major; and that no third-party proofreading, editing, or translating services have been used in its completion. Anastasia Nagornova

WORD COUNT: 4682

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... 5

INTRODUCTION ...... 6

AMERICAN AND SOVIET ...... 8

METHODOLOGY AND DATA ...... 12

SOVIET HORROR FILMS ...... 14

THE UNCANNY WOMAN ...... 16

CONCLUSION ...... 20

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 21

FILMOGRAPHY ...... 23

ILLUSTRATIONS ...... 26

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ABSTRACT

The horror film was not widely represented in Soviet cinema. The actual experiments with the genre have been started in the late 1970s – 1980s precisely when the gradual rapprochement with the USA began in the USSR due to the policy of glasnost.

American films influenced the genre form, but the inner gender core remained

“Soviet.” At the same time, American horror cinema has been the prevailing source of understanding of some of the critical issues related to the horror genre studies, especially gender constructions. Such over-analyzed models are problematic since they might not exist or not work in other cinematic traditions. The purpose of this study is to address this issue inherent in previous analyses of horror cinema and formulate a specific gender model (in particular, the female one) in Soviet horror films, the analysis of which has been lacking. This essay looks at female figures from

20 horror films released in the USSR between 1915 and 1991. Findings suggested that the logic of Soviet gender model is different compared to the Hollywood one. In order to show it, this paper combines several approaches, such as Clover’s idea of the

“Final Girl,” Mulvey’s concept of the “male gaze,” and Freudian theory of the uncanny.

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INTRODUCTION

The horror genre has a huge cinematic tradition. It appeared since the emergence of cinematography starting, probably, from the Lumiere brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895) – the legend says the audience screamed watching a train coming directly at them. There are many different horror film schools: German Expressionism, Hollywood horror films, Italian horror, British Hammer Studio horror films, etc. so that such a genre became an important component of film history. Interestingly, it was not widely introduced in until the late 1970s in a sense of domestic production: most of the horror films were imported. Only a few ones were shot here, for example, At Midnight in the Graveyard (1910) or Zagrobnaia skitalitsa (1915), which are either lost or partly preserved. Some experiments with the genre have been started in the 1970s – 1980s when several films were shot in the USSR. There are three reasons for this lack of horror films. First, Soviet filmmakers were not interested in this genre due to the Soviet ideology in which the focus has been placed on socialist realism, politics, and propaganda. The Stalinist cinema had to express specific ideas and moods suitable for the ideology where “the plucky optimism of comedies and the somber triumph of war movies had their utility for presenting a particular mindset to which the Soviet citizen could aspire; the indulgent despondency of horror did not.”1 Second, there was no need to be “entertained” the way horror genres do by frightening the audience. There were enough real horrors due to the Civil War, The First World War, and The Great Patriotic War. Third, Soviet cinema had much less experience with horror aesthetics and techniques than other cinematic traditions in terms of cultural foundations. Unlike European horror, it did not have so many diverse sources: detective stories, Gothic literature, Baroque art, the Decadent movement, and

1 Lev Nikulin, “No Horror in the ?” NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, April 26, 2019, http://jordanrussiacenter.org/news/no-horror-in-the-soviet- union/#.XtKW1fgzZPb.

7 fairground spectacles like freak shows.2 In the , the genre was developed mostly in the Romanticism culture in the figures of Pushkin and Gogol and “Satanism of Silver Age” and then reflected in the early experiments with horror, for example, in the first adaptations of Gogol’s works (Viy (1909), The Portrait (1915)).3 However, because of the Revolution, its further development stopped in its infancy. Nevertheless, although the horror genre was not vividly expressed in Soviet cinema, it is still important for understanding some of the critical issues related to this genre studies as a whole, especially gender constructions. It is not obvious at first glance why - it is more logical to suggest rather a melodrama or romantic comedy do this. However, Carol Clover points out that exactly the horror genre deals more with gender than any other genre. She looks at three different cinematic categories – the legitimate genres, such as melodramas, dramas, etc., horror, and pornography – and claims that they are ranked by the degree of sublimation of the sexual drive. Clover explains it on the example of Body Double (1983) by De Palma, in which the main character, an actor Jake, goes through the three layers of cinematic career, starting with Shakespeare and ending with pornography, because of his diverse fears: For De Palma, the violence of horror reduces to and enacts archaic sexual feelings. Beneath Jake's emotional paralysis (which emerges in the “high” genre) lies a death anxiety (which is exposed in the burying-alive of horror), and beneath that anxiety lies a primitive sexual response (which emerges, and is resolved, in pornography). Thus, “sensation” genres, in contrast with the legitimate genres, deal more with the unconscious, and “pornography thus engages directly (in pleasurable terms) what horror explores at one remove (in painful terms) and legitimate film at two or more.”

2 Dmitry Komm, Formuly strakha. Vvedenie v istoriiu i teoriiu fil'ma uzhasov (: BKhV-Petersburg, 2012), 16-30.

3 Josephine Wall, “Exorcising the Devil: Russian Cinema and Horror,” in Horror International, ed. Steven J. Schneider and Tony Williams (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 338.

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Therefore, Clover writes, “pornography, in short, has to do with sex (the act) and horror with gender.”4 So by studying Soviet horror films, we can see how gender was perceived and constructed in the USSR because, unlike other genres, the horror genre directly addresses gender issues.

AMERICAN AND SOVIET

The study of gender constructions in horror films is mainly based on the American tradition, which is problematic. Donato Totaro points out there are more interesting examples of gender constructions in European horror films which are necessary to consider rather than look at over-analyzed Hollywood models. The reason is that American gender constructions might not exist or not work in other cinematic traditions because their conventions are very different.5 Taking this into account, this paper is going to focus on Soviet horror films, gender critique of which has been lacking, providing another view on how gender might be constructed in cinema. However, the problem here is that it seems more logical to analyze Hollywood horror films rather than Soviet ones because they were the most popular and wide- screened so that their function of gender construction and their influence, therefore, are clear. Soviet horror films are very few and poorly known among the audience, which apparently means the analysis of them does not make any sense for an understanding of how cinema might construct and encourage views and stereotypes. This paper challenges such an assumption by referring to David Bordwell’s four layers of meaning, particularly, the symptomatic one. This layer of meaning involves all other ones and bears the set of values of a particular society in which a certain

4 Carol J. Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” Representations, no. 20 (Autumn 1987): 188-189, doi:10.2307/2928507.

5 Donato Totaro, “The Final Girl: A Few Thoughts on Feminism and Horror,” Offscreen 1, no. 6 (January 2002), https://offscreen.com/view/feminism_and_horror.

9 film was made. It is that kind of meaning which implies a social ideology inherent in the film.6 In this sense, any particular film reflects those cultural beliefs shared by a society in a specific historical moment. Thus, it is not important for me whether or not Soviet horror films were commercially successful or widely screened among the audience. The crucial thing is this implied ideology – the way gender was perceived and represented through the film. Therefore, I am talking about an implied viewer here, not those people who watched all these horrors at that time they were made. At the same time, I still think it is necessary to consider Hollywood horror films, in particular, slashers, along with the Soviet ones. First, this is because of the gradual rapprochement of these countries, which began since the 1980s due to Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost. Glasnost gave filmmakers and the market more freedom and autonomy, liberalized censorship. Hollywood motion pictures dominated the market, capturing 70 percent of audiences.7 It is no wonder, therefore, that Soviet filmmakers, following the example of Hollywood genre models, started making their genre systems more expressed. As a result, films became more Hollywood-like, and the first Russian slashers started to appear already in the early 2000s (Trackman (2007)) and even earlier (Snake Spring (1997)). Therefore, we can claim that American films influenced the genre form, but the inner gender core remained “Soviet.” Second, the logic of female character development in Soviet horror films is similar to how we see it in slashers. Like “Final Girls”8 – the only victims that stay alive, they come a long tough way of becoming a monster accompanied by continuous suffering. It can be argued, though, these women are more like femme fatale or vamp characters rather than Final Girls - they are also beautiful, seductive, and often mean death for a man charmed by them. These women

6 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013), 58-60.

7 Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 629.

8 Clover, “Her Body,” 201.

10 are usually two-faced in the sense that they pretend to be innocent at first. But there is an important difference between femme fatale and Soviet woman: in Soviet films, women are too innocent (at least at the very beginning) to be a femme fatale. They never have any conscious intentions to manipulate a man, which is a crucial point for this archetype. Thus, slashers are more relevant to consider them along with Soviet horror films. The slasher is a subgenre of horror cinema mostly developed in America in the 1970s. At that time, there were several cultural upheavals: the war in Vietnam, Watergate, and, consequently, different political conflicts, countercultures, and civil rights movements. Robin Wood, a film critic, argues in this respect that “the questioning of authority spread logically to a questioning of the entire social structure that validated it, and ultimately to patriarchy itself: social institutions, the family, the symbolic figure of the Father in all its manifestations.” Thus, the themes which this genre tried to explore were the Family, sexuality, and various psychopathologies. 9 Slasher has a specific formula: psychopathic killers from a crazy family, the Terrible Place, “tactile” weapons (hammers, knives, needles, etc.), the shocking effect of murders, the Final Girl.10 The conventional plot of the slasher is a group of young people who meet a killer murdering them one by one. These are the plots of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Halloween, (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), etc. The slasher film is characterized by a combination of sex and violence, the degree of which is determined by gender differences. As quantitative studies show, the perpetrator of violence in the vast majority are male, while the victims are mostly women; female characters are significantly more likely to be victims of violence in scenes involving sexual interactions than male characters, and these scenes with women are longer in duration; besides, the violence depicted in films are very

9 Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan… and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 44, 75.

10 Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 23-24.

11 detailed.11 Slasher horror film provides the idea of the “horror in the ordinary,” making events look real by using simple staging and “raw, unpolished” cinematography and turning conventional monsters into human beings. 12 13 In contrast, it is said the USSR experienced nothing so destructive like the American society did in the 1960s-1970s. Moreover, even though Brezhnevite Russia was described as the Stagnation period accompanied by ideological and cultural rigidity and some counter-systems, resisting this rigidity, such as youth countercultures, the black markets, and dissident undergrounds, on the whole, it was a period of material growth and “relative social stability.”14 In the late 1980s, however, due to the already mentioned glasnost, the Soviet system was criticized. Filmmakers centered on youth rock and punk cultures and the disturbing reality of daily life, introducing chernukha.15 To use Freudian terms, the carefully hidden unconscious finally spilled out, although films stylistically remained “Soviet.” This period of Soviet history was also characterized by the so-called crisis of masculinity, which was expressed in men’s low life expectancy, higher incidence rate, self- destructive practices (alcoholism, smoking, etc.), and so on. It led to an increased number of divorces, fatherlessness, and gender tension. Emancipated women dominated men in the private sphere, were more socially protected and economically independent so that men lost their powerful position.16 All this became the

11 Andrew Welsh, “Sex and Violence in the Slasher Horror Film: A Content Analysis of Gender Differences in the Depiction of Violence,” Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 16, no. 1 (January 2009), 1-25.

12 Komm, 152.

13 Wood, 79.

14 Wall, 350.

15 Thompson, Bordwell, Film History, 627-629.

16 Elena Zdravomyslova, Anna Temkina, “Krizis maskulinnosti v pozdnesovetskom diskurse,” in O muzhe(N)stvennosti, ed. Serguei Oushakine (: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2002), 435, 437, 446-448.

12 environment that formed the basis for exploration of the horror genre by Soviet filmmakers.

METHODOLOGY AND DATA

Since the horror film is hard to define as a genre because of its diverse plots, themes, and aesthetic techniques, I used two different strategies for choosing films. The definition of horror was borrowed from Komm, who defines horror as “the technology of fear.” It is a combination of aesthetic techniques that manipulates the viewer – arouses a particular emotional effect, for instance, shock or disgust. According to Komm, “a horror film is not what is shown but how it is shown.”17 Therefore, if a film tried to horrify the audience by any means, I categorized it as a horror. Then I followed those definitions provided by IMDb and KinoPoisk since they are the largest film databases. If one of them said a film belongs to the horror genre, I also classified it this way. Thus, the list of Soviet horrors consisted of 20 films: The Portrait (1915), The Marriage of the Bear (1926), Tariel Mklavadze's Murder Case (1925), Viy (1967), Yambuy's Evil Spirit (1978), The Wild Hunt of King Stach (1979), The Stretcher-Bearer Werewolves (1984), The Day of Wrath (1985), Mister Decorator (1988), Mochebuitsy-trupolovy (1988), Vepri suetsyda (1988), Stray Dogs (1989), Dina (1990), The Vampire Family (1990), The Hour of the Werewolf (1991), Lust for Passion (1991), Blood Drinkers (1991), The Night’s Lodging. Friday (1991), Daddy, Santa Claus Died (1991), and Lumi (1991). In this paper, I am interested in the female figure of Soviet horror films so that I mostly concentrated on those films in which women play an important role. Among all selected films, more than half of them (14) have female characters; the rest only have male ones. To narrow the sampling frame, I decided to consider only those films in which women have quite a lot of screen time, at least 30 minutes (12). Lastly, the choice was limited to films in which these female characters are the main ones

17 Komm, 9, 8-9.

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(victims or monsters). Thus, I am going to discuss 6 films: Viy (directed by Konstantin Yershov, Georgi Kropachyov, and Aleksandr Ptushko, 1967), The Wild Hunt of King Stach (directed by Valeri Rubinchik, 1979), Mister Decorator (directed by Oleg Teptsov, 1988), Dina (directed by Fyodor Petrukhin, 1990), Lust for Passion (directed by Andrey Kharitonov, 1991), and Blood Drinkers (directed by Yevgeni Tatarsky, 1991). I am going to look at these films more closely and see how gender is constructed in them. As for the slasher horror films, I am going to consider those released from the 1970s to 1980s, the so-called “Golden Age.” Since there are lots of them, the list involves the most iconic and representative films: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Carrie (1976), I Spit on Your Grave (1978), Halloween (1978), etc. For my analysis of gender constructions in Soviet horror films, I am going to use the classical feminist critique by Laura Mulvey and Freud’s concept of “the uncanny” (Das Unheimlich). Mulvey claims almost every film’s plot is driven by the “male gaze” – man is a controlling figure since the protagonist is usually male in films, and the overall is surrounded by men. They use women only as a source of pleasure - a substitute for the phallus, which is necessary to escape from castration anxiety caused by women’s lack of a penis. Mulvey suggests there are two different strategies: sadistic voyeurism, in which a man copes with the castration anxiety by getting pleasure to look at the woman punished, and fetishistic scopophilia, in which the woman is objectified and fetishized.18 Consequently, the audience also has to look at women one of these ways because they are forced to identify with the male protagonist and accept his and the camera’s point of view, at least, while watching a film. Thus, I consider the implied viewers of Soviet horror films as male (literally and/or metaphorically) who look at women in horror films using the sadistic-voyeuristic gaze. Further, I am going to use the Freudian theory of the uncanny, which claims the uncanny is everything that “ought to have remained

18 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures, ed. Stephen Heath (Houndmills: Palgrave, 1989): 21.

14 hidden and secret, and yet comes to light.”19 It means we consider something as uncanny not because it is alien, but because it was familiar once and then became repressed. In a way, the uncanny thing feels so because it reminds us about those parts of us which are unconscious. Using these theories, I want to argue that, in Soviet horror films, women go through a similar kind of process of phallicization like Final Girls in slashers until the moment of symbolic castration, after which they turn into a monster, becoming the uncanny object for men in the Freudian sense.

SOVIET HORROR FILMS

Now, I would like to give a sense of how Soviet horror films look like and describe their common characteristics. It will allow us to see some patterns and the very logic of how women are portrayed in them.

Films. Soviet horror films seem different from slashers. They do not have the same key elements in their structure. Unlike slashers, their monsters are mostly female while victims are male, scenes of murders are not detailed, and it seems Soviet horrors do not deal as much with sex and sexuality. Instead, they try to raise some sort of philosophical questions concerning such dichotomies as death/life, natural/artificial, human/non-human, etc. They also adapt literary texts for their plots (Mister Decorator is based on Grin’s novel The Grey Automobile; The Vampire Family is an adaptation of The Family of the Vourdalak by Tolstoy). The events are often placed in the past, pre-revolutionary Russia. As for the style, Soviet horror film still is in its “Gothic” stage with its theatricality and aestheticization of violence.

19 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1999), 225.

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Monsters. Female supernatural monsters are the brightest feature of Soviet horror films. They are in the first place and make up more than half of all the monsters in the horrors outstripping animals (dogs/werewolves and bears) and men. But they are never protagonists (the only exceptions are Dina and The Night’s Lodging. Friday); we follow the story from the male’s point of view – a young man who often falls in love with the monster. These female monsters are always supernatural creatures: vampires, witches, and demons. However, they are not often monsters from the start; sometimes, the entire film is the story of becoming (Lust for Passion, Blood Drinkers, The Vampire Family), and they do so not of their own volition. These women are young, very beautiful, innocent, and often have unfortunate destiny. For example, Nadezhda from The Wild Hunt of King Stach is a complete orphan, the last of her noble lineage, and Dasha from Blood Drinkers, also an orphan, although she has relatives, does not get along with them.

Transformation. In Soviet films, women become monsters because of a man (The Wild Hunt of King Stach, The Vampire Family), sometimes even because of the protagonist (Mister Decorator, Lust for Passion). They suffer before or after the transformation although the nature of this suffering might differ: it can be physical pain from the blows of a stick (Viy) or the spiritual one from loneliness and mystical visions (The Wild Hunt) caused by a family legend and supported by the female character’s custodian for his own gain. The Wild Hunt is also unique in the sense that the woman, Nadezhda, does not literally become a monster in it. She is told by everyone that they saw the mysterious Blue Woman in her house who does not come and show only to that person who has to die soon. But it turns out Nadezhda did not see the Blue Woman because she was this woman all the time – they saw her walking at night when Nadezhda was hiding in different rooms from people.20

20 Dikaia okhota korolia Stakha (The Wild Hunt of King Stach), directed by Valeri Rubinchik (1979; : , 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfytMClm0LA).

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Women versus men. Interestingly, Soviet horror films mostly end with the death of a man (not necessarily protagonists), often together with the monster. The monstrous women either win and escape or are destroyed by the male agency. However, there are some examples of different interesting endings. In The Wild Hunt, the mysterious events find their rational explanation: Nadezhda’s belief in her doom and ghost sightings are caused by her hypersensitivity, and the Hunt turns out to be not real, being designed by Nadezhda’s custodian. In the final scene, Nadezhda goes to Saint Petersburg along with the protagonist. Another example is from Blood Drinkers, the ending of which is kind of ambivalent. The film’s plot reveals the story of a young man who tries to save his beloved Dasha from her grandmother-vampire. He seems to succeed, killing the monster; however, at the very end of the film, when the happy couple leaves the fearsome house, Dasha turns her face right to the audience and smiles so that we see her red eyes.21 Such a plot twist makes us completely rethink the entire film because it suggests Dasha was a vampire the whole time, and the protagonist became a victim of some sort of conspiracy. In any case, the male agency is always necessary: resolution is about male and female confrontation, which determines the monster’s fate.

THE UNCANNY WOMAN

Paradoxically, women in Soviet horror films are victim-killers in comparison with the victim-heroes (or Final Girls) in slashers.22 The Final Girl is young, good looking, not sexually active, and boyish: she is smart, serious, good at the mechanics, and capable to fight a killer back or even kill him with extreme violence. According to Clover, the Final Girl becomes the main character toward the end of the film, and the (male) audience has to identify with her since no other characters stay alive (this

21 P'iushchie krov' (Blood Drinkers), directed by Yevgeni Tatarsky (1991; Saint Petersburg: Studio, https://www.ivi.ru/watch/31853).

22 Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, 4.

17 is why her gender is so ambivalent). Throughout the entire film, the Final Girl appropriates all the phallic symbols, becomes stronger, and wins the killer, literally or symbolically castrating him. Clover says that “the moment at which the Final Girl is effectively phallicized is the moment that the plot halts and horror ceases.”23 The victim-killers are also young and beautiful but not boyish at all – they become stronger keeping their femininity. For example, in Dina, the girl is a young lady who lives with her father under the protection of her maid – toward the end of the film, she turns into a woman who raises a child alone and can stand up for herself. As well as Final Girls, they have to fight with a man who torments them, therefore, the audience empathizes and supports these women. The process of identification is quite complicated here: it is hard to identify with both of a woman (she is not the main character and later becomes a monster) and the main male character (he is either the woman’s tormentor or so infantile and arrogant that it is hard to be sympathetic). So, the audience changes its sympathies depending on the situation. But when the woman symbolically castrates the man (stabs with a knife, bites, tears out his eyes), the horror does not cease, and the plot continues: the woman turns into a monster and starts killing innocent people, mostly men. Compare these scenes of murders from I Spit on Your Grave (directed by Meir Zarchi, 1978) and Lust for Passion. In I Spit on Your Grave, a writer Jennifer plans to revenge those men who raped her. Her first victim is Matthew. Jennifer lures him into the woods, claiming she wants to have sex with him. As Matthew nears his orgasm, she puts a noose around his neck and hangs him on a tree. After Jennifer kills the last of her rapists, she speeds away, and the film ends.24 In Lust for Passion, the main character (she does not have a name) is a mentally unhealthy woman who is constantly tortured by her husband. She sees a psychotherapist and tells him about her hallucinations: her double, a seductive half-naked woman in black talks to her.

23 Clover, “Her Body,” 202-204, 211.

24 I Spit on Your Grave, directed by Meir Zarchi (1978; Beverly Hills, CA: Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2012), DVD.

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But it turns out this woman is real – a demon. When her husband tries to rape her, this creature comes. While he kisses the woman, the Demon stabs him thrice in the back. Together the women push the dead body off and have sex (two different selves metaphorically unite) (Fig. 1). The story continues: she starts killing men.25 In this sense, the scene of lesbian sex implies not only the unity of different selves (masculinity and femininity) but also that such a woman does not need a man anymore. So, the models are quite similar at first. Both Jennifer and She are tortured by men, get stronger, and fight back. The male viewer identifies with both of the women but, if in the case of the slasher, it works well, in the Soviet horror film, it does not. Despite her beauty, Jennifer is boyish, and when she symbolically and literary castrates men appropriating the phallus, Jennifer truly becomes a man. There are no problems with identification: castration anxiety is resolved by recovering her masculinity. In Soviet horror film, the woman is not boyish: she screams, cries, and moans as it is expected from her. She also takes revenge and is phallicized. However, there is a problem: if identification with her was possible before the moment of the murder because we were sympathetic, after that it is not. Let us see how it works in the film. She is the main character. When we start watching, she is the first one we see on the screen and who has the largest amount of screen time. Together with her, we resolve the mystery of the double and know more than any other character. When the scene of the murder starts, only She and we know what was before – a confrontation with her monstrous self. We looked at it from her point of view (in any such scene, there are no men) and felt the same fear. When she walks into the room, the camera focuses on her since her husband is in the shadows. He asks rudely about the reasons for her strange condition, approaching her and blocking the way. She pushes him and moves away – and stays alone in the medium shot, closer to the audience. We see her illuminated figure and face. In contrast, the medium long shot of her husband distant us from him, especially because he stays in

25 Zhazhda strasti (Lust for Passion), directed by Andrey Kharitonov (1991; USSR: Art-Happening Center, YouTube, June 21, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyjgJq9YaGk).

19 the dark, which is emphasized by his black suit (Fig. 2). Then we see a close-up of her frightened face and mimicry this emotion: along with her, we see the monster; the man does not. They start a fight – the camera shoots from her position as if we stand behind her. She struggles and runs - the camera follows her; the man either is not in the frame or his image is cropped. Finally, we see a POV shot of a knife she takes for defense. This scene has visually constructed the way the viewer can identify with the woman. After the murder and her transformation, we cannot do it. She appears only twice in the human body; the rest of the time her presence is indicated by lightning or sound. The detective becomes the leading character. In these scenes she appears, we look at her from the conventional fetishistic male gaze (Fig. 3). When she comes for the detective and psychotherapist, they destroy her quite quickly so that there is no other choice for the viewer but identify with men. So, according to Mulvey, the male gaze is a sadistic-voyeuristic look in cinema (to Clover, it becomes a masochistic-voyeuristic one in slashers and, consequently, Soviet horror films), whereby male fear of castration is eliminated by the pleasure of seeing a woman punished. Her sexuality is repressed. But in the slasher horror film, by the time a woman castrates a man, she becomes phallicized. Her masculinity is recovered by symbolically appropriating a phallus, and castration anxiety gets resolved. In contrast, in the Soviet film, her recovered masculinity, along with femininity, gets the monstrosity index: her repressed sexuality returns. It is not a woman, not a man, and even not a human being – it is all together. It evokes the Freudian feeling of the uncanny – the combination of the familiar and what supposed to be hidden, repressed. Gender uncertainty, therefore, means something terrible, uncanny; it becomes unclear how to treat this monster. Soviet horror film solves this problem by eliminating the Uncanny Woman and replacing her with the “normal,” conventional male hero, with whom the viewer can identify again. Thus, we can conclude female masculinization is perceived as a positive thing in Hollywood cinema. In the Soviet one, it is something negative because it means the death of a man and gender uncertainty, which creates the uncanny feeling.

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CONCLUSION

Of course, not all Soviet horror films fully fit this pattern. There are some exceptions: male monsters, no castration, no becoming. Nevertheless, the core, the Uncanny Woman, remains and prevails. Next year, I want to explore the male gender and address the issue of the already mentioned crisis of masculinity. I will argue that there is a connection between this phenomenon and how gender was constructed in Soviet horror films. It would be also interesting to answer how the process of identification with the Uncanny Woman works in the case of women. How do they read this message? Does this trend persist in post-Soviet horror cinema? One might ask why we need to care today about how very few Soviet horror films portray gender roles. What is so important about them? I believe that by analyzing these films, we can see how cinema in general affects and is affected by society. It can say something important about the formation of stereotypes and, also, media as a whole.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013). Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations, no. 20 (Autumn 1987): 187-228. doi:10.2307/2928507. Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1999. Komm, Dmitry. Formuly strakha. Vvedenie v istoriiu i teoriiu fil'ma uzhasov. Saint Petersburg: BKhV-Petersburg, 2012. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Visual and Other Pleasures, edited by Stephen Heath, 14-26. Houndmills: Palgrave, 1989. Nikulin, Lev. “No Horror in the Soviet Union?” NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, April 26, 2019. http://jordanrussiacenter.org/news/no-horror-in-the-soviet- union/#.XpV8ffgzZPa. Thompson, Kristin and David Bordwell. Film History: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003. Totaro, Donato. “The Final Girl: A Few Thoughts on Feminism and Horror.” Offscreen 1, no. 6 (January 2002). https://offscreen.com/view/feminism_and_horror. Wall, Josephine. “Exorcising the Devil: Russian Cinema and Horror.” In Horror International, edited by Steven J. Schneider and Tony Williams, 336-58. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005.

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Welsh, Andrew. “Sex and Violence in the Slasher Horror Film: A Content Analysis of Gender Differences in the Depiction of Violence.” Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 16, no. 1 (January 2009), 1-25. Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan… and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Zdravomyslova, Elena and Anna Temkina. “Krizis maskulinnosti v pozdnesovetskom diskurse.” In O muzhe(N)stvennosti, edited by Serguei Oushakine, 432-51. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2002.

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FILMOGRAPHY

Bragin, Vladimir, dir. Liumi (Lumi). 1991; Moscow: Kamera Studio, PrestigeStudio- M, 2004. DVD. Buneev, Boris, dir. Zloi dukh Iambuia (Yambuy's Evil Spirit). 1978; Moscow: . https://www.ivi.ru/watch/425548. Carpenter, John, dir. Halloween. 1978. https://www.ivi.ru/watch/61077. Cunningham, Sean S., dir. Friday the 13th. 1980. https://www.ivi.ru/watch/64981. De Palma, Brian, dir. Carrie. 1976. https://puzzle-movies.com/films/carrie-1976. Gardin, Vladimir and Konstantin Eggert, dir. Medvezh'ia svad'ba (The Marriage of the Bear). 1926; Moscow: Mezhrabpom-Rus. YouTube, October 15, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbzUtZKWdFw&t=2s. Goncharov, Vasily, dir. Vii (Viy). 1909; Moscow: Pathe Brothers Company. Goncharov, Vasily, dir. V polnoch' na kladbishche (At Midnight in the Graveyard). 1910; Torgovyi dom Khanzhonkova. Hooper, Tobe, dir. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. 1974. https://www.ivi.ru/watch/82704. Kharitonov, Andrey, dir. Zhazhda strasti (Lust for Passion). 1991; USSR: Art- Happening Center. YouTube, June 21, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyjgJq9YaGk. Klimov, Gennadiy and Igor Shavlak, dir. Sem'ia vurdalakov (The Vampire Family). 1990; USSR: Kinoob"edinenie “Aist.” YouTube, accessed March 20, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8Z0zMhlOps. Lebedev, Nikolai, dir. Nochleg. Piatnitsa (The Night’s Lodging. Friday). Part 1. 1991; Moscow: . YouTube, February 23, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg1za6xZJeU&t=13s. Lebedev, Nikolai, dir. Nochleg. Piatnitsa (The Night’s Lodging. Friday). Part 2. 1991; Moscow: Mosfilm. YouTube, February 24, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC2zfZat2OE.

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Lebedev, Nikolai, dir. Zmeinyi istochnik (Snake Spring). 1997; Moscow: Gorky Film Studio. https://hd.kinopoisk.ru/film/48ffb51ea6581b1582473556aa119198. Mamilov, Sulambek, dir. Den' gneva (The Day of Wrath). 1985; Moscow: Gorky Film Studio. YouTube, November 1, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIsZgsLEoDA. Myortvy, Andrei, dir. Mochebuitsy-trypolovy. 1988; USSR: Mzhalalafilm. YouTube, September 19, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOJVfQjxHXw. Perestiani, Ivan, dir. Delo ob ubiistve Tarielia Mklavadze (Tariel Mklavadze's Murder Case). 1925; USSR: Goskinoprom Gruzii. Petrukhin, Fyodor, dir. Dina. 1990; Moscow: Kinkom. YouTube, February 15, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2h7PjTn8Ac. Rubinchik, Valeri, dir. Dikaia okhota korolia Stakha (The Wild Hunt of King Stach). 1979; Minsk: Belarusfilm, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfytMClm0LA. Shavlak, Igor, dir. Putevoi obkhodchik (Trackman). 2007; Vox Video, 2007. DVD. Shevchenko, Igor, dir. Chas oborotnia (The Hour of the Werewolf). 1991; Nikolaev: Tonis. Starevich, Vladislav, dir. Portret (The Portrait). 1915; Russian Empire: Atel'e V. Starevicha, Prokat Skobelevskogo komiteta. YouTube, July 23, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O05GDJAq1g. Svetozarov, Dmitriy, dir. Psy (Stray Dogs). 1989; Saint Petersburg: Panorama Studio. YouTube, November 21, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrghqnyHbMA. Tatarsky, Yevgeni, dir. P'iushchie krov' (Blood Drinkers). 1991; Saint Petersburg: Lenfilm Studio. https://www.ivi.ru/watch/31853. Teptsov, Oleg, dir. Gospodin oformitel' (Mister Decorator). 1988; Saint Petersburg: Lenfilm Studio, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gionjAiTmaY. Tourjansky, Victor, dir. Zagrobnaia skitalitsa. 1915; A. Taldykin, N. Kozlovsky, and Co.

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Yershov, Konstantin, Georgi Kropachyov, and Aleksandr Ptushko, dir. Vii (Viy). 1967; Moscow: Mosfilm, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Amh3uudVMBo. Yufit, Yevgeny, dir. Vepri suitsyda. 1988; USSR: Mzhalalafilm. YouTube, April 5, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp9DBlDH-jI&t=134s. Yufit, Yevgeny, dir. Papa, umer Ded Moroz (Daddy, Santa Claus Died). 1991; Saint Petersburg: Lenfilm Studio. https://www.ivi.ru/watch/26615. Yufit, Yevgeny, dir. Sanitary-oborotni (The Stretcher-Bearer Werewolves). 1984; USSR: Mzhalalafilm. YouTube, March 31, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTMRUgloqfA&t=9s. Zarchi, Meir, dir. I Spit on Your Grave. 1978; Beverly Hills, CA: Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2012. DVD.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1 She and the Demon have sex after killing the husband, 51:32 Screenshot Zhazhda strasti (Lust for Passion) (directed by Andrey Kharitonov, 1991) YouTube, June 21, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyjgJq9YaGk

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Figure 2 She argues with her husband, 48:00 Screenshot Zhazhda strasti (Lust for Passion) (directed by Andrey Kharitonov, 1991) YouTube, June 21, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyjgJq9YaGk

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Figure 3 She and the psychotherapist, 1:03:04 Screenshot Zhazhda strasti (Lust for Passion) (directed by Andrey Kharitonov, 1991) YouTube, June 21, 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyjgJq9YaGk