General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Ghouls (Вурдалаки) (2015 film)

The Ghouls (Вурдалаки, Vurdalaki) is a Russian fantasy horror film directed by Sergei Ginzburg, loosely based on Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy's 1839 novella A Family of Vourdalaks (Семья вурдалака). It was filmed in Crimea in 2015 and released theatrically in Russia on 22 February 2017 by Central Partnership.¹^•² The film is set in the 1740s, during the reign of Empress Elizabeth, and follows a monk exiled to a monastery in the Carpathian Mountains who confronts a vampire threat.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Вурдалаки (Vurdalaki); sold internationally as Ghouls and Vamps, among other names⁴
Director / writers	Sergei Ginzburg; screenplay by Tikhon Kornev, Alexey Karaulov, Evgeny Kolyadintsev, and Alexey Timm⁴
Source	Based on the gothic novella Semya vurdalaka (1839) by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy⁵
Russian release	22 February 2017, distributor Central Partnership, 85 minutes, age rating 12+¹
Budget	160 million rubles per one production report; Kinoafisha lists 162,000,000 RUR²^•⁴
Box office	44,008,009 rubles (about $765,623) in Russia and the CIS, with 185,299 admissions, as of 2 April 2017¹
Reception	Negative: an aggregate of 14 Russian critic reviews is hosted at Kritikanstvo; IMDb rating 4.3⁶^•⁴

Spoilers

Story and source

The plot is set in the 18th century at the Spassky monastery in the Carpathian Mountains, where Lavr (Mikhail Porechenkov), the confessor of Empress Elizabeth, has been exiled.³^•⁴ The backstory, laid out early in the film, holds that a superior race of vampires once ruled the world, treating humanity as livestock, until half-breeds, half human and half vampire, sided with humans and overthrew the vampire tyranny; the ancient ghoul Vitold awakens to restore his race's former glory through the half-blood girl Milena.⁷^•⁸

The producers described the film as made "based on" Tolstoy's novella rather than as a direct adaptation, because the original story is too short for a feature film; they said they tried to preserve as much of it as the new story's structure allowed.⁵ Some reviewers disputed even that degree of connection, arguing that calling the film an adaptation of Tolstoy was baseless.⁹

The cast also includes Konstantin Kryukov as Andrey, a man exiled to the Carpathians, Roman Madyanov as Paramon, Andrey Rudensky as Vitold, and Anna Arlanova and Yulia Aug in supporting roles.²^•⁴

Production

The screenplay was written in 2008 but sat on the shelf for six years because filming could not begin for various reasons. Preparation for the production started in 2014, and the following year director Sergei Ginzburg's team began shooting in Crimea; filming there wrapped in 2015.²^•⁴ The producers were Andrey Radko and Ekaterina Gorodetskaya of the GORAD production center, working with the film company Alliance; the same producers had earlier made the horror film Diggery (Диггеры).⁵^•⁴

Ginzburg had worked mainly in television, and The Ghouls was one of only two feature films in his filmography at the time, the other being the comedy Lyubov-Morkov 3 (Love-Carrot 3).⁴^•³ One noted production detail: the scene in which actress Aglaya Shilovskaya swims nude was shot at dawn in a cold mountain lake.⁴

Release and box office

The film opened in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine on 22 February 2017.⁴ Its trailer had been attached to six earlier Central Partnership and Volga releases, including Gods of Egypt, The Crew, and xXx: Return of Xander Cage, giving it a potential trailer audience reach of 10.38 million viewers.¹

Opening day grosses in Russia were 2,884,635 rubles from 942 theaters, placing first for that single day. The four-day holiday weekend of 23 to 26 February brought 28,741,015 rubles from 111,862 admissions, ninth place for the weekend, for a running total of 31,625,650 rubles.¹ Business then collapsed: weekend grosses fell 86.65 percent in the third week and 91.51 percent in the fourth.¹ By 2 April 2017 the film had earned 44,008,009 rubles (about $765,623) in Russia and the CIS from 185,299 admissions, with Russia accounting for 96.6 percent of the total; Kinoafisha lists worldwide grosses of $782,438.¹^•⁴ Against a budget reported at 160 to 162 million rubles, the theatrical run returned well under half of its production cost.²^•⁴

Reception

Russian critics received the film poorly. Kritikanstvo aggregates 14 reviews from Russian publications, and typical verdicts called the film unremarkable and derivative, one describing it as a secondary story about a lone monk fighting vampires that was unlikely to capture a wide audience.⁶ Kinoafisha's review criticized the camerawork, editing, and visual effects, while the Uralweb review gave it 2 out of 10, crediting only the scenery and the short running time.³^•¹⁰ On IMDb the film holds a rating of 4.3.⁴

Viewer reviews on Kinopoisk were divided but frequently negative, criticizing a thin script, rushed pacing, and unremarkable action staging, while some praised the special effects and the Crimean locations.⁷ The 85-minute running time was cited both as a flaw, leaving characters underdeveloped, and as a virtue, since the film ends before it wears out its welcome.⁷

Context: the vourdalak on screen

Tolstoy's story had been filmed before. A 1990 Soviet version, Semya vurdalakov (plural, in the title), directed by Gennady Klimov and Igor Shavlak, moved the plot from 18th-century Europe to contemporary Soviet life.¹¹ Tolstoy's novella later inspired other adaptations as well, including Adrien Beau's French film The Vourdalak (2024), which critics received far more warmly.¹² The word vurdalak itself comes from Slavic folklore, where it named a regional variant of the vampire, known elsewhere as upyr or upir, before entering the broader vampire literature and film tradition.¹³

The Ghouls belongs to a small wave of Russian genre films of the mid-2010s that tried to build commercial horror and fantasy on Russian literary and folkloric material, following the commercial success of the fantasy film Viy (2014). Scholars of Russian cinema note that the most successful domestic attempts at horror have combined Hollywood genre structure with plots drawn from Russian myths and fairy tales.⁵^•¹⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026