Deaf Crocodile Films: The Savage Hunt of King Stakh (1980) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Deaf Crocodile Films

Belarusian author Uladzimir Karatkievich’s 1964 novel King Stakh’s Wild Hunt, loosely based on the Wild Hunt folklore motif involving a pursuit led by a mythic figure escorted by supernatural beings engaged in hunting, became the focal point and the subject of controversy when it was adapted into the cult Russian language film The Savage Hunt of King Stakh in 1980 by director Valeri Rubinchik.  Much like Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange and Andrei Tarkovsky’s take on Solaris, neither film was met with approval by their original authors who felt something key was missing from each respective project lost in translation from text to screen. 
 
Despite the authorial disavowing, cuts made to international release versions and previous total unavailability for years that didn’t stop the intensely dedicated folks at Deaf Crocodile Films from unearthing, publishing and re-releasing this forgotten slow-burning masterwork of Eastern European folk horror for generations to come.  With renewed interest in folk horror thanks to Midsommar and Severin Films’ deluxe All the Haunts Be Ours box set, Deaf Crocodile’s release of The Savage Hunt of King Stakh is a completely undiscovered gem made available to the Western public for the very first time.  Presented in a newly restored director’s cut overseen by Craig Rogers from Deaf Crocodile Films and Seagull Films,
 
At the turn of the century, Belarusian ethnographer of ancient folklore Andrei Beloretsky (Boris Plotnikov) arrives at the decrepit isolated mansion of Marsh Firs (Elena Dimitrova) on a mission to research the grisly gruesome legend of 15^th century nobleman King Stakh whose spirit allegedly still roams the melancholic countryside and woods.  As the film’s hero settles into residing within the mansion, the film becomes an unending spiral down bottomless rabbit holes with increasingly bizarre occult vistas tinged with death and doom including but not limited to a bleeding man, a dwarf in a doll house, angry ravens and a most unsettling form of puppet theater. 

 
Spanning two-hours and fusing together folk horror with supernatural intrigue as a downbeat somber odyssey through Belarusian folklore, the film is like a Soviet Mill of the Stone Women with a spooky haunted mansion housing unspeakable horrors and just a hint of Robin Hardy.  Somewhere between Viy, The Hourglass Sanatorium and Jabberwocky, The Savage Hunt of King Stakh and its interpretation of the Wild Hunt folklore motif is a thoroughly melancholic, uncanny and even subtly draining exercise in near-medieval gothic folk horror.  Though the author complained the film lacked a key theme from his book referring to Belarusian sorrow, watching the film is something of a funereal experience both frightening and full of anguish.

Co-written by Vladimir Korotkevich, lensed with exquisite, desaturated melancholy in 1.33:1 by female The Birdwatcher cinematographer Tatyana Loginova and glazed over with a brooding mournful low-key score by Evgeniy Glebov, the look and feel of this ethereal cross between Terry Gilliam and Jan Svankmajer is somehow at once sterile clean and sopping wet messy.  Loaded with strange costumes, occult looking interior mansion set pieces and open marshy fields as the faint whisper of a low hum of grief-stricken score quietly sobs on the soundtrack, being in the daylight netherworld of The Savage Hunt of King Stakh is a bit like navigating a post-apocalyptic Hellscape of what once was an aristocracy. 

 
The hero of the film Beloretsky played by The Ascent and Heart of a Dog actor Boris Plotnikov functions as the audience’s point of view in a structure much like Maya Deren’s Meshes in the Afternoon or more recently Roman Polanski’s Repulsion where our only plane of reality consists of fantastical beings or impossible scenarios.  Co-starring is Gentlemen of Fortune and The Diamond Arm actor Roman Filippov and Ballad of a Soldier actor Yuriy Dubrovin, the ensemble cast of characters sort of blend together while the real stars of this strange slow-burn horror show are the locations and mansion itself.  Scenes of characters coming across Wild Hunt armies against a desolate barren open landscape evokes a sense of aching doom like ghosts floating in a vast arena.  The mansion itself seems to change and transform over the course of the picture in ways subtle and jarring, almost in an organic manner.

 
Not really an overt scare fest but rather a depressed transposition and reworking of Uladzimir Karatkievich’s text onto the film canvas as a genre-bending hybrid, The Savage Hunt of King Stakh though not as harsh as the book nevertheless brands itself onto your flesh like a hot poker, stinging initially before subsiding but still lingering weeks later.  In a special-edition project overseen by Craig Rogers to restore the film to its original running time and the first of Deaf Crocodile’s new season of home video releases of Eastern European cult classics, Valeri Rubinchik’s nebulous and ethereal but ultimately haunted picture arrives in domestic moviegoers’ homes as a long thought to be lost gem of folk horror cinema.  Intentionally a difficult work to put your finger on, The Savage Hunt of King Stakh like many of the best macabre mysteries of Alain Resnais, Luis Bunuel or David Lynch lures you into a cavern of subconsciousness where anything thought can and probably will happen.

--Andrew Kotwicki