On the Nature of Werewolves Ancient pagan Russia, which has not yet come to the Christian path, is in a state of nightmares and bloody visions of inexhaustible reality, for Evil reigned in it. A small forest village is shocked by a series of brutal murders of young girls, the fault of which is the Beast - a werewolf, a night demon who appeared out of nowhere and went nowhere. To stop this bloody harvest, the villagers decide to beg for their sins by sacrifice, without even assuming that the true Evil is not so easy to appease.
“Feophany painting the death” of the famous Russian director and screenwriter Vladimir Alenikov, best known for his instructive animated films and the catchy story of the adventures of Petrov and Vasechkin, which came out in the post-perestroika era and on the eve of the decline of the entire Soviet Empire in 1991, while being one of the first creations of joint American-Russian filmmaking in purely genre cinema, especially mysticism and horror films, on the one hand does not strive for an in-depth and serious view of the development of pre-Christian Ancient Rus’s mythology, sometimes using this purely illusiveness in the background. Exploitation is sometimes intentional, grotesque, giving the picture an even greater flair of entertainment, despite the fact that it is not without success that the theme of destructive bigotry, pagan madness, human blindness and total dehumanization is revealed. Salvation from evil, whose face seems more than symbolic, naturally lies in the plane of churchification, the Christianization of society, the progressive transition from one stage of development to another, from inexhaustible savagery to humanization.
But on the other hand, you should not expect anything really significant from this picture. By the present time, Alyonikov’s film, in his extensive filmography and completely passed unnoticed, is perceived as an exercise in a new genre, as an attempt to instill in the then still Soviet cinema, unblemished by horror in general, the traditions of Western fantasy, mysticism and horrors, translating them, however, into the plane of Slavophilism, but without excesses; an attempt to tell the history of vicious werewolves against the background of a changing era, but without obvious historical indications and intentional parallels with the new reality of total publicity. In general, “Theophany” with all its exclusively genre utilitarianism is left a picture of a timeless order in which there are only universals and maxims, types, but not archetypes; no longer art in its pure form, but not quite reckless and ruthless thrash, but something in the middle with a completely authentic form. Sometimes there is a clear feeling that “Theophany painting death” has become a forerunner, including the so-called “Slavic fantasy”, having in its cinematic content almost all the main features of this genre, like the ancient Russian space of action, reworked in the spirit of postmodern myths and legends of old Russia and the presence of a bright hero, an expressor of author’s thought. In the picture of Alenikov, such is the character of George Seagal, Gregory, who bears the features of a doubting fighter not so much with external, visible Evil, as with internal, much more dangerous. Of course, in the same year 1991, another Russian horror on the theme of werewolves was released, told already in the spirit of the literary works of Alexei Tolstoy, but in fact, with the closest molecular detail, Alenikov’s film seems more integral and interesting, not devoid of specific charm and saturation, even entertainment. Therefore, the film will not be denied its incomprehensible right to exist and be interesting, despite the corruption of time.