“Ukrainian witch drives away Russian soldiers”: the new wave of horror films about Putin’s army | film

WWhen filming began on the Ukrainian horror film The Witch: Revenge in late 2023, the costumes for Russian soldiers were sourced directly from the battlefield. “They were real Russian uniforms,” says the film’s producer, Irina Kostyuk, speaking from Kiev. “Captured soldiers or dead soldiers, they took those uniforms, cleaned them, and used them.” After cleaning the uniform, the filmmakers had to sand it again so it looked livable. Some of the jackets still bore written names, and many had their names crossed out, perhaps because Russian soldiers had taken them themselves from their fallen comrades. “It was a big challenge for [Ukrainian] “Actors wear them,” says the producer.

The film, also known as The Konotop Witch, is about a witch who gave up her powers but summoned them back after the Russians killed her fiancé. The film was a huge success at the Ukrainian box office last year, earning $1.4 million — a very large number for a country during a war, facing curfews and power outages. It’s also the first in the horror universe cycle, called Heroines of the Dark Times, which Kostyuk is overseeing. Kostyuk and her team have now completed the second film in The Dam series. The zombie-splattered film, filled with blood and severed heads, follows a unit of Ukrainian soldiers, led by a female fighter named Mara, who uncover a Cold War-era laboratory where Soviet scientists conducted gruesome experiments in the 1950s. Mara and her team face the inevitable battle with undead Soviet soldiers – but they must also confront their deepest fears, and learn to trust each other.

All of which begs the question: Why turn to horror movies when you have plenty of them in real life anyway? Viewers’ reactions to films change in wartime, Kostyuk says. In 2023, she produced an animated family fantasy film called Mafka: Song of the Forest, about a legendary green-haired wood nymph who guards the forests. Although she had been working on it long before the Russian invasion, Ukrainian moviegoers interpreted it as a patriotic wartime allegory and it became the highest-grossing Ukrainian film of all time, grossing $21 million worldwide.

But by 2024, Kostyuk says she realized the mood had turned bleak. “People wanted revenge,” she says. This is what The Witch delivers on a large scale. The film’s tagline was: “This is a movie where a Ukrainian witch drives away the Russians,” and it resonated immediately. For a Western viewer, the film makes for particularly bleak viewing. After the invasion, Russian soldiers are shown raping and killing before the witch casts her dark spells on them and they begin to die in ever more horrific ways.

“‘The Witch’ was supposed to be scary. It’s quite visual, very graphic. But for the Ukrainian audience, it wasn’t scary. They would look at that guts splashing from the Russians and they would be satisfied,” says Kostyuk.

If you’re not Ukrainian, the dam experience is also an unnerving experience. At certain moments, it feels like an Eastern European answer to Shaun of the Dead, with cheesy decapitations and absurdly gory visual effects. You think it must be a satire – but then you remember that it was made in the middle of a very real war, and there’s nothing funny about it at all.

How does Kostyuk explain the films’ feminist overtones? According to her, it is as much about the market as anything else. “Right now, the theatrical audience in Ukraine is driven by women because a lot of males are at war. There aren’t many men left to go to cinemas… But I think it’s also to do with the fact that Ukrainian mythology is very rich, and it’s always about the feminine side.”

Kostyuk hopes that “The Dam” (which makes its international debut at the American Film Market this week) will find appeal beyond Ukrainian borders, both for horror fans and for any of us in the West who are wary of Russian expansionism. “This is where Putin wants to bring Russia back now, to the Soviet imperial mentality, to the Soviet Union. We are fighting the remnants of that mentality and trying to prevent it from coming out of the metaphorical bunker.” There’s a third film in development, about a policewoman fighting right-wing neo-Nazi vampires.

Ask Kostyuk if it’s safe to make such films and she dismisses the question as no longer worth asking. “Now that we are in the fourth year of the war, I don’t think the safety factor applies anymore when you choose your sites. You choose the sites and then deal with them. It is a huge risk.”

However, it is true to say that audience demand is changing all the time. Last year, Ukrainian moviegoers were hungry for revenge. Now, they yearn to escape. Tales of the living dead are becoming less popular, and The Dam has done modest business since its release in Ukraine last month. However, Kostyuk is brave. She recently supervised a live-action version of Mavka, called The True Myth, which was filmed in the forests and lakes of wartime Ukraine and created a stir on schedule despite constant air raids. If anyone is a heroine of dark times, you can’t help but think that Kostyuk might be the same. After all, making zombie movies and family adventures in the middle of an invasion requires a very special kind of intelligence.