Birzhan, a big-city detective, moves his family to the remote village of Karatas and is called to investigate an eerie series of events at a maternity hospital. Pregnant women are getting sick, all at once, some of them even dying. His investigation leads him straight into the heart of Kazakh folklore. The village is under the curse of Albasty, a spirit that hunts infants.
The local police constabulary is far from helpful. When they are not threatening him at nearly every turn, they are bribing him with letters of recommendation to return home, to the big city. Just close the case, and he can leave Karatas. But Birzhan is determined to see their way through this otherworldly storm of local witchcraft. He finds himself working with Sara, a fortune-teller and a face known to the local cops. Together, they will get to the root of these horrific events and overcome the curse of Albasty.
The story goes that Kazakh writer and director, Adilkhan Yerzhanov (Steppenwolf, A Hard Hard Man) was hired to create a web series for the local Kazakh audience. Known for brutal and harsh thrillers, what was different this time around was that Yerzhanov had dipped their toes into the horror pool. They did such a good job with the series that it completely freaked out focus groups, and they would have to go back over the series and tone it down to make it more palatable for the local audience.
At the world premiere, the audience at Fantasia, seasoned and hardened horror fans alike, got to see the first three unadulterated episodes in their original form. Fortunately, they covered the story arc of Birzhan’s discovery and his pursuit of the origin of this curse, so it could be presented in a feature-length format. We were there to find out - what was so scary to local Kazakhs that the whole series needs to be toned down to be watchable?
In every way, Kazakh Scary Stales is an Adilkhan Yerzhanov film. From the harsh, desolate landscapes to the characters hardened by their surroundings, this all feels very familiar to fans of Yerzhanov's films. Hard people doing hard things in hard places.
What humor there is is mostly dry and straight-faced, not delivered with any more exuberance than is necessary. There is also some silly banter during what may be a budding romance over a couple of episodes. Yerzhanov understands that humor breaks up the tension. But in the films of his that I have seen, he has always had this approach to humor in his crime and thriller films, the same way Kitano did in their yakuza films.
So, how is Yerzhanov at horror? He did a good job. He employed trends and tropes familiar to international horror audiences to tell a story of local lore and myth. They read our notes (not really, but you like to think that they’ve been paying attention to the horror-sphere and what horror fans like) and used in-camera effects, including that grotesque physical prop mentioned earlier, which horror fans love. Yerzhanov is at the very least a fan of horror films, and here he is finally able to do some of the things that he probably wanted to do for a while. He will do your web series for you, but first, he needs the props department to build him a large, grotesque Cronenberg’d demon.
There is a universality going on here. There is something about horror that exposes our commonality apart from our differences. As different as we are, in the places where we live, in our upbringings, in our beliefs, we are also not so different, you and I. What we are scared of may differ from one place to the next, but everyone gets scared of something eventually.
About those beliefs. Other than one more very good and criminally underseen Kazakh horror movie from last year called Dastur, a supernatural-themed horror flick, we have not had enough exposure to Kazakh media to get a clear sense of how strong those beliefs are in the rural environment. It has always been the point of folk horror; out in the hinterlands, everyone is a little further back in time or backwards in their worldview enough that it poses a threat to the outsiders. Belief gives power to their fears. Everything we know about a place is from its movies, right? It is very much like watching a spiritual horror flick from Southeast Asia and not being scared of ghosts so much as someone from that region will be, because in their hearts, they believe it, while Westerners made an entire reality television industry out of hunting for them.
So, here we are, there for the thrill of it, exploiting their belief system for feature-length thrills and chills. And after that bout of deep musing, the question remains: is Kazakh Scary Tales really that scary? Uh, not really. Are we going to be the one that says that what scares Kazakhs is weak sauce? Aw, hell no. Do you think we want to find ourselves in these remote plains of Kazakhstan and tell these hardened people that they have weak constitutions when it comes to horror cinema? We have no clue what kind of exposure the local audience has had to the horror genre, just how much of it is in their intake on the regular.
We can see that Yerzhanov is a fan, and this series would not exist in Kazakhstan if there were not a demand for it. Everything here, every horror tool utilized, is very familiar to international horror fans, but draped in a different guise, which is why it may not be as soul-crushing to us as it would be to the local audience. But it should still find an appreciative audience of horror fans wherever it plays, simply for existing in a place we did not know it could exist. Let horror cinema continue to take over the World.