Contemporary Yakut Film Horror: Representation and Socio-cultural Context

This article provides an anthropological study of modern Yakut horror cinema through the prism of its continuity from the Yakut tyubelte - folklore mystical stories about a meeting with the otherworldly. The chthonic plots and visual solutions used in the Yakut regional horror film are considered from the point of view of functional and semiotic analysis. The research optics in the narrative of this study is the perception of fear as a functional part of the plots under study, which reflect social tension and are part of public communication. Thus, the infernal motives that are encoded in the terrible, within the framework of the study, act not just as part of artistic or aesthetic creativity, but also as a means of expressing social anxiety. During the work on the article, Yakut films related to the horror genre, individual copies of published Yakut tyubelte, as well as ethnographic data on the traditional spiritual culture of the Yakuts were used as sources. The main part of the article is divided into two semantic parts: a semiotic analysis of visual images and a systematic analysis of plot narratives, which is due to the specialization of each author and allows us to comprehensively consider two important semantic parts of the film - visual and plot. The authors conclude that modern Yakut horror cinema, like the folklore on which it is based, reflects collective experiences: the loss of a traditional way of life, reflection on past events, and can also act as a means of public communication. The authors declare no conflict of interests.

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