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February 01, 2007
Bring out your dead daughters: Russia's first horror?
Is Pavel Ruminov's Dead Daughters the first Russian horror movie? Tom Birchenough considers at Moscow Times. 2006 "saw the release of The Witch, a loose adaptation of the Nikolai Gogol story "Viy" that was promoted as the same thing. But given that [it was] in English and set in [the States], there are grounds for disputing its Russian provenance. And then there was the original 1967 version of Viy, which can genuinely claim to be the only Soviet horror movie." Dead Daughters, 
Birchenough avers, "is certainly the first contemporary Russian horror movie, set in the all-too-recognizable location of an outlying Moscow neighborhood. It's also one of Russia's most successful engagements with the realms of genre cinema to date, the kind of project that fuels the film business from Asia to Hollywood. Critics the world over (including, periodically, this one) may frown on all that, preferring the more rarefied reaches of the art-house stratosphere... Ruminov is certainly one of the more colorful characters in the Russian film industry... at last summer's Kinotavr festival in Sochi, [found] him fuming about the local industry—using some quite fruity language—in front of a roundtable panel on co-productions. It's worth noting, too, that he was fuming in very fluent English... The real surprise is that Ruminov is more aware than any other director I have yet met here of the history of the U.S. independent film industry -- and seems to be in touch with many of its current leading players." Four films preceded the $1m Daughters, "shot on budgets in the tens of thousands of dollars." "The future of Dead Daughters doesn't look limited to Russia... with remake rights acquired for the United States through the same company that, among other films, bought the rights to remake... The Ring. Horror is a genre that travels well, and the Asian influence on Ruminov's work is strong, though he insists it's geared more around South Korea than Japan." [More details of the production at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at February 1, 2007 07:57 PM
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