Folk Horror Festival, Part 4: Horrors Veiled By the Iron Curtain

Time for another dip into Severin’s All the Haunts Be Ours, their sumptuous boxed set of lesser-known folk horror movies. So far in this series of articles we’ve seen the impressive range of different countries the movies selected hail from, and for this article we’re going to look at three productions from 1967-1970 which were produced in Communist bloc countries. This would hail from a period when, whilst the Cold War was still very much an ongoing concern, censorship restrictions in Iron Curtain countries had eased compared to the heights of Stalinism and a certain amount of cultural communication across the dividing line was taking place. Despite the political barriers (and the inherent hurdle any movie has in markets where the language it is made in is not widely spoken), at least one of these productions ended up gaining some notoriety in international cinematic circles, and the others all deserve their share of attention too.

Witchhammer

It is the early 17th Century. In Šumperk, in the Kingdom of Bohemia, the elderly peasant woman Maryna Schuchová (Lola Skrbková) is spotted concealing a Communion wafer in a handkerchief. She claimed it was to feed to a sickly cow to cure it – the sort of folk remedy which you’d naturally expect to arise in a cultural milieu that venerates the Host so highly. Some of the local clergy recognise that – but others think that they are dealing not with essentially Christian-minded (albeit unorthodox) folk practices but Satanic witchcraft.

It is clear that the matter will not be settled without some sort of Inquisitorial process. The moderate clergy, led by the well-educated Dean Lautner (Elo Romancik) encourage the local countess to appoint Kaspar Hutter (Rudolf Krátký), a respected judge who is known to be sensible in these matters – in his most recent investigation he exonerated the four women accused on the grounds that they were not of sound mind. However, precisely because Hutter has shown mercy in the past, the local hardliners aren’t keen on him. They propose instead a certain Boblig (Vladimír Smeral), a failed law student turned Inquisitor for hire whose lack of fine credentials is made up for, in their eyes, by his zealous pursuit of witches.

Due to the controversies around his past investigations, Boblig is out of practice – for the last few years he’s dropped out of law entirely and has been running an inn – but once he gets the invite to come and preside over the witch trials in Šumperk, he and his assistant Ignác (Josef Kemr) see the opportunity to hop back on the gravy train and enjoy the fruits of high society once again. Of course, that particular gravy train only runs so long as there’s a regular supply of suspects to keep the trials going. Fortunately for Boblig and Ignác, their investigative methods always turn up more suspects – and when others like Dean Lautner try to moderate their excesses, they have a strange way of ending up on the suspect list…