This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

And this is Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema, we're going to be talking about the 1967 Soviet folk horror film V, a story about a near-do-well seminary student who bumbles his way into a blood-curdling confrontation with witchcraft, living death, and the armies of hell

via some absolutely amazing 1960 special effects.

V was based on an 1835 novella by the author Nikolai Gogol, and it gets its title from the name of a monstrous creature

that the protagonist is brought face to face with at the climax of the story so in the the

author's note above the top of the novella gogol describes the v as the king of the noms whose eyelashes reach to the ground

did you get much of a gnome feeling when we finally see the v in this thing in a well in a sense

cinematically it reminds me reminds me of the was it a gnome king and return to oz

oh yes he's called the gnome king without a g is-E. Yeah, so it did remind me of that.

I was digging into this a little bit, and the story is supposedly derived in large part from

Ukrainian folklore.

Gogol was himself Ukrainian-born, and we can think of this as very much, you know, Ukrainian story that we're discussing here.

But apparently there's some discussion as to whether gnomes actually factor into Ukrainian folklore. So it's very possible that the entity v is the element in the story that is pretty much a creation of the the author here. This is

Google's creation. And we can look to various things he might have drawn upon from other

cultures. Like it has, again, like what eyelids or eyebrows that cover eyes that cast a deadly

ray. This reminds us a little bit of an Irish mythology, the king of

the Fremorians, whose lids are like that. I think his brow hangs down over a terrifying gaze,

and if you raise that brow, if others raise it for him, then he can decimate the enemy.

I don't know what exact word Gogol would have used that these authors translate as gnome in that note.

...