Despite a long and rich history of fantasy films, Russia and its onetime territories like Estonia have only rarely dabbled in outright horror. The most famous example is easily Viy, with other oddities that step into the genre more or less include Dead Mountaineer's Hotel and Tear of the Prince of Darkness. A real surprise for many international viewers when it first hit DVD, the Soviet-era Belarusian production The Savage Hunt of King Stakh adapts a dense, folkloric novel from 1964 by Uladzimir Karatkievich, blending murder mystery and the possibly supernatural into a rich Gothic tapestry that makes for perfect viewing late on a chilly evening.

At the end of the 19th century, researcher Beloretski (Plotnikov) seeks refuge from a storm while looking into superstitions and folklore in the Belarus countryside. He ends up inside the strange and foreboding walls of Marsh Firs, whose mistress, Nadezhda (Dimitrova), speaks of the numerous spectral presences in the vicinity. Among them are the Little Man and the Blue Lady, but the most foreboding is King Stakh, who was slain along with his hunting party decades earlier. Now his ghost is reportedly knocking off those in the bloodline he feels responsible for his death, with Nadezhda and her few remaining eccentric relations the last in line. Soon another man of rationality and science, Svetilovich (Kharitonov), enters the mix as well, all of the swirling in a hallucinatory string of events including a naked woman submerged in feathery down, a macabre puppet show, suspicious servants, colorful relatives, and a snowy climax filled with revelations.

It's impossible to watch this film without thinking of analogous fantastic cinema works it might relate to ranging from Hammer classics to Mario Bava to Roger Corman's Poe films to locked room murder mysteries, with its visual scheme managing to be both painterly and tantalizing with its emphasis on decayed textures and obscured compositions through glazed windows, pillars, and architectural beams. It's interesting that this came out the same year Umberto Eco published The Name of the Rose, as there seemed to be something in the air at the time dealing with the contrast between decaying antiquity and the modern scientific method. It's all doused in heavy Gothic atmosphere with loads of fog, spooky paintings, and eerie costumes including some creations near the end that would now slot this as part of the wide-ranging folk category category.

Though it got a fair amount of festival play in the early '80s after being shot at the end of the prior decade, The Savage Hunt of King Stakh was a film far more spoken of than seen for many years. A DVD from Ruscico clocking in at 105m1s (with really awful interlacing) featured Russian 1.0 mono and 5.1 surround audio options, plus 5.1 English and French dubs with Russian, English, French, German, Spanish, or Italian subtitles. Extra include an interview with director Valery Rubinchik (12m24s) about the film's tricky genre classification, filmographies for the director and main actors, and a photo album (of frame grabs). This 2002 release wasn't part of the U.S. distribution deal Ruscico made with Image Entertainment, so it was much trickier to track down and didn't stay in circulation for very long.

In 2024, Deaf Crocodile finally gave the film its first easily accessible stateside release as a Blu-ray special edition, available as a standard edition, a deluxe limited edition of 2500 copies featuring a hard slipcase with newly-commissioned artwork as well as a 60-page illustrated book, and for the truly dedicated, a 200-unit bundle featuring a limited edition coin, a "pearlescent" trading card, five postcards, and a sticker featuring label mascot Romero the Crocodile. The book is quite the experience in itself, featuring lengthy and well-written essays by Walter Chaw and Peter Rollberg. The restoration of the film itself is cited as being from the best film and audio elements, and the big surprise here is that it's a much longer director's cut running 132 minutes (even longer than the 126 minutes listed in some sources as the most complete print). Compared to the DVD you'll see right away that the extensions here amount to longer intros and outros to many scenes and longer dialogue bits rather than entire standalone sequences; apparently the film was trimmed in an attempt to speed up the pacing that instead just made it a bit choppier. Obviously the detail here is much better with no more ugly interlacing, and the color scheme shifts to a more foreboding, earthy look here compared to the green and blue appearance of the DVD. The LPCM 1.0 mono Russian audio sounds excellent and features good English optional subtitles. Also included are a pair of robust and very different audio commentaries with Stephen R. Bissette and Mike White each going solo; the former dives headlong into the source novel with extensive comparisons and narrated excerpts, while White draws in a lot of comparisons to relevant Russian cinema and other genre connections. The folk horror angle gets the primary focus in the two video extras, a wonderfully articulate and perceptive video introduction (13m1s) by Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched filmmaker Kier-La Janisse who covers the nationalist attitudes of Belarus at the time and its impact on genre storytelling, and "The Wild, Wild Hunt of King Stakh" (16m10s), a video essay by Evan Chester charting the movement's origins with Shirley Jackson and the big three British films on through this film and more recent offerings as well as other possible cinematic influences.

Deaf Crocodile Blu-ray

Ruscico DVD

Reviewed on October 1, 2024

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