Made immediately after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, and mournfully described as “the last film of the Czech New Wave,” Morgiana unites the director of The Cremator with the visionary cinematographer of Daisies and Diamonds of the Night, giving a decadent, intensely gothic flourish to a tale of two sisters-one good, one very, very bad. The lovely, rather boring Klara is adored by all the boys, but her psychotic, wicked sister Viktoria is prepared to have the last laugh, even if it means filling Klara's sweet little bosom with deadly, slow-acting poisons. Herz fills this nineteenth-century tale with enough decadence, psychoses, and suicides to please Edgar Allen Poe, while Kuçera films it with an eye simultaneously hallucinatory and composed. The film's gorgeous excess of Gothic romanticism and horror caused it to be labeled sadomasochistic and nearly banned, but it was paradoxically saved by the Russians themselves, pleased that it adapted the writings of Alexander Grin, the “Russian Poe.”