The Hitlerian army has merely encroached upon the territory of Ukraine, and the majority of the local people have been already ready to cave in to a new regime. The Ukrainian policemen have killed the boy. It is clear that there is no hope to expect the justice from the invaders, that’s why the killed boy’s mother declares the war on the hangsman.
A newspaper sends a young reporter into the Russian countryside to make a nice, sensationalist yarn out of some strange stories going around. Once in the countryside, Igor is accommodated by a peasant family living in the middle of nowhere close to a ruined church. The family is convinced that their dead patriarch will return from the dead as a blood-drinking fiend exactly nine and a half days after his demise.
This literary adaptation was one of only two films made during World War II on the subject of the Civil War following the Bolshevik Revolution, as attention by filmmakers and viewers shifted away from past history and toward the current conflict.
