Virtual Friday Night Films at the Wende: Spooky Selections from the Eastern Bloc

In celebration of Halloween, the Virtual Friday Night Films at the Wende series is offering two weeks of triple-feature frights. This week we invite you to watch Cold War-era films from Czechoslovakia: Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Saxana: The Girl on the Broomstick, and The Cremator.

A girl on the verge of womanhood finds herself in a sensual fantasyland of vampires, witchcraft, and other threats in this eerie and mystical movie daydream. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders serves up an endlessly looping, nonlinear fairy tale, set in a quasi-medieval landscape. Ravishingly shot, enchantingly scored, and spilling over with surreal fancies, this enticing phantasmagoria from director Jaromil Jireš is among the most beautiful oddities of the Czechoslovak New Wave.

Available to watch on Criterion Channel.

Saxana: The Girl on the Broomstick (DÍVKA NA KOŠTĚTI), dir. Václav Vorlícek, 1972, Czechoslovakia, 75 mins

This kid-friendly fantasy comedy tells the story of a teenage witch (played by Petra Černocká) who faces 300 years of detention for failing her shapeshifting class. With the help of the school janitor and a retired vampire, Saxana turns into an owl and visits the human world, where she befriends a zookeeper’s son, goes to human school, and ends up turning the faculty into rabbits.

Watch for free on Youtube.

The Cremator, dir. Juraj Herz, 1969, Czechoslovakia, 140 mins

Czechoslovak New Wave iconoclast Juraj Herz’s terrifying, darkly comic vision of the horrors of totalitarian ideologies stars a supremely chilling Rudolf Hrušínský as the pathologically morbid Karel Kopfrkingl, a crematorium manager in 1930s Prague who believes fervently that death offers the only true relief from human suffering. When he is recruited by the Nazis, Kopfrkingl’s increasingly deranged worldview drives him to formulate his own shocking final solution. Blending the blackest of gallows humor with disorienting expressionistic flourishes—queasy point-of-view shots, distorting lenses, jarring quick cuts—the controversial, long-banned masterpiece The Cremator is one of cinema’s most trenchant and disturbing portraits of the banality of evil.

Available to watch on the Criterion Channel.

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Virtual Film Picks are inspired by the in-person Friday Night Films at the Wende program series. This selection is part of a curated list of weekly movie suggestions that can be watched at home, in conjunction with #WendeOnline.