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| Images courtesy of Gorky Film |
The debut psychological horror film of Wolfhound and Flight
Crew writer-director Nikolai Lebedev Snake Spring, The Source of
Snakes or as it is being translated here The Spring of Snakes represents
not only one of the very first post-Soviet Union based psychological thrillers
but also a career launcher for many key players involved. For instance between then-producer Valery
Todorovsky’s involvement who himself went on to direct the surreal psychological
drama Hypnosis and his preferred actress of choice Ekaterina Guseva who
made her screen debut in the lead role, The Spring of Snakes was in a way
something new for audiences and the people making the movie. Made on a tight budget and shot in a
breakneck speed of twenty-six days by recurring Alexei Balabanov
cinematographer Sergei Astakhov, the giallo-esque psychological thriller works
in all sorts of striking visual influences ranging from Sam Raimi’s The Evil
Dead to Dario Argento’s Suspiria, making it a very midwestern kind
of Russian horror.
In the late 1990s, young pedagogical university student Dina
Sergeeva (Ekaterina Guseva) comes to a small isolated provincial town seeking an
internship teaching reform-school students biology courses to appease her
doctor boyfriend Alexei. However one
night she learns her beau is already betrothed to the underage daughter of
schoolteacher Mariana Pavlovna. Going
for a swim in the river, the body of a young strangled girl bobs to the surface
to Dina’s shock and screams, alerting the authorities but also putting all eyes
on herself as the prime suspect. While a
local police investigator turns up the heat interrogating Dina, trying to
coerce a confession of guilt, photographs of Dina next to the deceased in a
beach restaurant near a town landmark dubbed the Snake Spring show
up. Stranger still, the man who took the
pictures Andrei (Dmitry Maryanov from Higher Than Rainbow) claims to
have no recollection of snapping them.
Soon the film shapes up to be a giallo-esque venture as Dina and Andrei
join forces to try and clear her name and get to the bottom of what’s turning
out to be a frame up.
Full of rich visual cinematography that will make viewers
think of a certain horror franchise including but not limited to a striking
shot of a paper airplane being thrown at the teacher as the camera follows its
every move towards the front desk, boasting a brooding ambient score by Mikhail
Smirnov and boasting more than a few startling scares, The Spring of Snakes is
a taut little gem that kicked the doors wide open for a few of its key
players. Ekaterina Guseva makes an
excellent scream queen we ourselves are not fully sure of her innocence as she
wades into a kind of The Wicker Man small town housing dangerous secrets
of deceit and/or murder. Towering over
her is Olga Ostroumova as the ferocious schoolmaster who bores away at Dina’s
defenses at every turn despite intervening in life-or-death scenarios once or
twice. Fans of The Evil Dead will
spot Sam Raimi’s rotating camerawork right away as well as elements of the folk
horror piece infused into this tightly wrapped murder mystery including a key
vista involving the first-person point-of-view shot of the camera following a
character through the woods.
Considered by some Russian critics to be a loose reworking
of Nikita Mikhalkov’s 1974 film At Home Among Strangers, a Stranger Among
Our Own, the lean and mean The Spring of Snakes opened in Russian
cinemas in 1997 to generally positive reviews.
Some called it Russia’s answer to western horror, which in a post-1988 A
Little Doll film world it kind of is.
Consider the scene where a group of youths are gathered around a CRT
television watching The Evil Dead.
With enough time and tide for the Raimi epic to soak into Soviet
viewership and onward, the international influences of Western horror on
Eastern European horror couldn’t be more evident. An integral contribution to the folk horror
subgenre, murder mystery and answer to the Italian giallo film, The Spring
of Snakes is a little engine that still can and invariably paved the way
for what would or wouldn’t evolve into an entire subgenre of Russian film.
--Andrew Kotwicki
