New Soviet Film Is a Horror--and Audience Is Thrilled : Movies: ‘A Lust for Passion’ won praise at Moscow premiere simply for being made. Genre has long been banned.

The blood looked suspiciously like ketchup in some places and chocolate in others. The twanging musical build-up to moments of suspense could have been lifted directly from Alfred Hitchcock classics. And the female demon appeared to have snitched her black veils, lace gloves and spike heels from Madonna’s closet.

But “A Lust for Passion,” premiering in Moscow this week, packed one of the capital’s biggest theaters and won praise simply for having been made--the first major horror film to debut with a splash in a country where the genre had long been banned altogether.

The film’s makers were unabashed about borrowing their horror tricks from Western movies--the cemetery under whipping rain, the black-gloved hand snaking through a window to grab a woman’s throat, the horribly grinning eyeless henchmen.

“You can’t rediscover America,” actor-turned-director Andrei Kharitonov said. “We didn’t try to discover anything, we just tried to make an effective film on a professional level.”

Producer Alexander Okulich observed: “There’s enough of this in the West. But for us, it’s all new. You can’t think up anything really new. Americans, you wonderful people, have already thought up everything. You can only do something of your own. And ours is based on Russian material.”

Billed as “A horror movie with elements of mysticism,” the film was inspired by the works of Valery Bryusov, a leading symbolist poet known at the turn of the century for his ornate style and open eroticism.

It was shot mainly in Yalta at an imposing palace that first belonged to Czar Alexander III and later was used as a summer house by Soviet dictator Josef V. Stalin. Anastasia Vertinskaya, who stars as a wealthy woman tortured by strangely real hallucinations of a demonic alter-ego, spends much of the film draped in furs and lace.

Although “A Lust for Passion” is a thriller first and foremost, its makers also had pity on downtrodden Soviet viewers who tend to compare their own lives to horror films these days, and they tried to make it visually luxurious as well.

“We don’t have lines for sausage in it,” Akulich said. “We tried to make it beautiful--beautiful and terrible.”

Kharitonov shrugged off criticism from several middle-aged ladies who asked how he could shoot such a “horrible film.”

“Such films are the only choice in these times,” he said, “because all around, everything is painful and horrifying.”

The economic times are so bad, he said, that he suspected some of the premiere audience that overflowed the 1,200 seats at the Espace-Mir cinema sat through the movie only so that they could get to the free food at the reception afterward.

It was a tribute that the viewers stayed put through the 76-minute film on one of the hottest evenings of the year in a hall that lacked air conditioning and adequate ventilation.

Otherwise, there was little reaction from the audience aside from some light clapping whenever the troubled inspector--played by a stubbly Igor Kostilevsky, who bore something of a resemblance to Harrison Ford--coped with his situation by taking a swig from his pocket flask.

The crowd also cheered at the end when the heroic doctor finally drove the female demon from the palace with a well-brandished silver cross.

But they accorded “A Lust for Passion” no applause after the final titles.

“I don’t know why they called it a horror film,” historian Alexander Spiridonov said.

Boris Grachevsky, himself a film producer, observed of the movie: “The most horrible thing about it was the absence of horror, waiting for it. It borrowed from cheap films like ‘Nightmare on Elm Street.’ They should have borrowed from ‘The Omen’ instead.” Still, he added, “It’s nice that the new genres that were not allowed . . . are appearing now. You just have to get burnt at first, you have to go through mistakes and take into account world experience.”

Until Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms of the late 1980s, horror films were considered products of the decadent West and as verboten as pornography.

Socialist realism of the “boy-meets-tractor” school and light farces dominated the Soviet screen. Millions of Soviet movie-lovers got acquainted with horror, pornography, martial arts and shoot-’em-up films only by obtaining video recorders and underground tapes.

Kharitonov, whose favorites among underground horror videocassettes were “The Shining” and “The Hunger,” said that “A Lust for Passion” was “our attempt to show viewers our own variant.”

In part, he added, if the film proves profitable it could encourage the country’s army of underpaid cinematographers as they try to turn Soviet cinema into a money-maker.

Okulich refused to divulge how much the movie cost to produce. It is only now being offered for distribution. But he said that it is sure to bring in at least twice what it cost to make and could even prove a box-office giant if, as his most optimistic estimates hold, it yields a profit of 15 million rubles--about $8 million, according to the inflated commercial exchange rate.