Weekend One • Czech Horror • Presented by Severin Films • Introduction by Kier-La Janisse
Though Juraj Herz’ most critically-lauded work remains his 1969 film The Cremator – first released on DVD in 2006 and given the Criterion treatment in 2020 – his opulent fairytale The Ninth Heart (featured briefly in the documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, playing elsewhere in the festival) is an uncanny trip into an underworld of automatons, stolen hearts and magic. A struggling student befriends an itinerant marionette troupe (led by iconic actor Josef Kemr, who also appeared in folk horror favorites Marketa Lazarová and Witchhammer), and when they collectively run afoul of the local Lord, he volunteers to rescue the Lord’s daughter, who has been put under a spell by an evil alchemist. Inanimate objects spring to life as the living succumb to death in the topsy-turvy world of this dark fable.
Herz has been noted by historian Kat Ellinger as the only filmmaker in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia to openly identify as a horror director, and studied puppetry at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague alongside Jan Svankmajer, who would remain a key collaborator (Svankmajer’s wife Eva designed the poster for The Ninth Heart and both provided visual effects and animation). It is thus in The Ninth Heart that many of his aesthetic and thematic obsessions converge — puppetry, poverty, imprisonment and death — illuminated by a parade of golden candelabras and a playful sense of the grotesque. (Kier-La Janisse)
Directed by Juraj Herz
Czechoslovakia, 88 minutes
Czech with English subtitles
US Theatrical Premiere of new restoration courtesy of Severin Films
Copies of Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched and the accompanying box set All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror will be available at the Severin Table throughout the first weekend of the festival.