In 1944 the fantastic film Kachtchei bessmertnyi (Kachtchei the Immortal, Aleksandr Ro'ou) was released on the screens. Inspired by several Russian folk tales, it tells the story of the invasion and destruction of a village by the hordes of Kachtchei a traditional monster who passes for immortal, the capture of a young virgin that he takes in his lair. In putlocker you can have all kinds of films.
The Other Options
Chained and asleep in his castle for refusing to marry her, she is finally delivered by the valiant Ivan, a fearless and blameless hero who, of course, succeeds in killing the monster. If it is not difficult to see in this film a metaphor of the Nazi invasion of 1941, and a call to Russian patriotism, the interest for us is elsewhere: the figure of the monster appears like an undeniable presence of the film horror.
The character of Kachtchei, a horrific presence in the foreground, betrays his source of inspiration: his very expressive body and facial play and his particularly mannered elocution evoke German expressionism revisited by Hollywood. Its interpreter, Georgi Milliar (1903-1993), a sort of Russian Bela Lugosi, has already made himself famous by playing Baba Yaga, another "monster" of Slavic folklore, in 1939. To the play of the actor are added his lair, a castle perched in the mountains, and erotic innuendos with the metaphor of the chained captive; the whole is reminiscent of the classics of German expressionism, in the first title Nosferatu (1922), which itself served as a model for Dracula by Tod Browning (1931).
The Other Times
More than twenty years later, another example of a film where a horrific presence can be detected is Eksperiment doktora Absta (The Experience of Doctor Abst, Alexander Timonichin, Ukrainian SSR, 1968). During World War II, a Nazi doctor experimented with his discoveries on Soviet prisoners. Resistance fighters seek to prevent him, and in an end in apotheosis, explode his laboratory. In this film, largely overlooked by critics, which rightfully belongs to the genre of adventures, intended again for a young audience, a single scene, even a single shot, suggests that it is a residue of an another genre: the heroes discover through the bull's-eye of the laboratory door of poor creatures transformed into “zombies” (the term is not used) who wander without respite.
Conclusion
The subject of human beings reduced to the status of zombies by the inhuman experiences of Nazi doctors during the war, or on behalf of the Americans after it, is not new. Nazis and Americans are the main enemies of Soviet Russia, who often work together. In Serebristaia pyl '(Silver Dust, Abram Room, 1953), African-Americans were already shown as victims of a Nazi doctor who had worked for the Americans, who was experiencing a gas with a very particular effect, taking advantage of the climate racist in the United States. However, to our knowledge, no film using this script element has staged "zombified" humans as does this 1968 film. We will add, which naturally remains a hypothesis, that western horror cinema, then marked by The Night of the Living Dead (here, the Night of the Living Dead, George Romero, United States, 1968), could again serve as inspiration.