Tag Archives: Polish

Polish Horror Series #4 – Demon

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It’s not a new question, but what exactly makes something a horror film? Does it need a supernatural monster? Do there have to be jump scares? Does it need to show us horror, make us feel horror, both, neither? Does it need to actually be scary, or if it rather has the feeling of a mournful, anxious, mad dream, can it make the cut? I tend to cast a wide net, and while there are some thrillers, for example, that I’m not particularly keen on looking at through a horror lens, who am I to object if someone else wants to do so?

Today’s film is one that I’ve been impressed by for years and which is I think sadly underseen. One could argue quite fairly that it isn’t a horror film at all, but I would disagree.  If anything, I think it has perhaps suffered from people coming to it expecting a certain kind of spooky possession flick (perhaps its name doesn’t help in this regard) and instead finding an art house drama, but I think the horror is there.  A horror of remembrance, of terrible guilt uncovered – of what exactly – it may not actually specify, but the degree to which pains have been taken to cover things up, to consciously forget an irreparable pain and loss, and make a life atop the bones is surely the stuff of horror. It may not scare, but it surely haunts.

Demon (2015)

Like a mix of Wyspiański’s Wesele and Ansky’s Dybbuk, with a dash of the Jedwabne Pogrom on top, Marcin Wrona’s final film (he sadly committed suicide while promoting it) is a delirious, surreal, lingering meditation on the sins of the fathers, on the weight of past wounds that can’t be healed, on the drive to forget and the need to cling to what has passed and cannot return. A young man, Peter/Piotr comes to a village in Poland from London to marry his girlfriend Żaneta and fix up the old house she has inherited from her grandfather.  The night before the wedding, working on the property, he uncovers a human skeleton, thus stirring up a painful mystery of the past – whose home had this been before and what happened to them? How exactly did Żaneta’s grandfather come to possess this land? What isn’t being talked about?

The next day, Piotr is behaving very strangely – throughout the ceremony and the party that follows, he keeps seeing a dark haired, possibly dead, young woman whom he calls “Hana” (having seen the name written on a doorframe in the grandfather’s house, tracking a child’s growth). He has fits which are diagnosed as epilepsy, tries to get information out of Żaneta’s father who rebuffs him, and inquires with the priest about seeing the spirits of the dead. Finally, in a climactic seizure, he is possessed by the ghost of Hana, a young Jewish girl who had lived in the house long ago.  Żaneta’s father does everything within his power to keep a veneer of normalcy on the proceedings and save face within his community, but when Piotr/Hana disappears and cannot be found, all descends into drunken chaos and the next morning brings a sense of broken devastation. Piotr’s car (its driver having never resurfaced) is deposited in the water of the quarry that Żaneta’s father operates, the house is demolished, and all is forgotten once more.

The sparseness of the story is a strength here. There is very little to the plot and yet, a sense of mystery prevails, adding to the emotionally conflicted atmosphere of the whole. While we generally follow Piotr throughout, we are not privy to his inner life, and when his behavior shifts, we are initially unsure of exactly why. Similarly, the world of the film is somewhat inscrutable. In its opening, as Piotr is taking a ferry to his destination, he sees a woman in her nightgown screaming inconsolably and trying to walk into the water, her arms restrained by others who try to pull her back on shore. Who is she? Why is she screaming? Is this another possession? Is it just the presence of grief? We don’t know, but it sets a tone for what follows.

But it isn’t only gloom and sadness at this wedding. There is also a strong element of the absurd, of a desperate mania suffusing the event. From the start, in the behavior of the guests, in the music, in the rituals of the wedding party, there is a folksiness that is, in the beginning, simply fun and lively, and oh so specific. This is not a general presentation of ‘wild party,’ but the idiosyncrasies of both culture and character give it all a real life which is both appealing and intimidating – Piotr is a complete outsider. He knows his bride and her brother (with whom he worked in London) and no one else, and under the best of circumstances, it could be daunting to come into this kind of insular, intense community, where he doesn’t quite speak the language (though as a foreigner living in Poland, I think he does very well, and I wonder what we are supposed to surmise of his family background).

And everyone in it is so well drawn, so present and physical and earthy – sometimes ridiculous, sometimes threatening – from the new father-in-law who does not approve of this too short courtship (and moves to immediately have the marriage annulled once, now possessed, Piotr is deemed defective), to the doctor who makes such a big deal of being sober, but is the town’s biggest drunk, with the heart of a morose poet, to the friend of Żaneta’s brother, who seems dangerously into her and has it in for Piotr immediately (it’s even possible that he kills him, but nothing is certain), to “the professor,” an old, Jewish school teacher, doddering in his age, but also carrying a gentle sadness, the only remaining Jewish person in this town, which is implied to have had a thriving Jewish community before the war.

As the evening develops, and Hana’s emotional and spiritual grip on Piotr takes hold, the winds rise, rain pours down, the vodka flows like a river, and the revelry of the whole mad town of guests builds to a fever pitch. Generally, many of them don’t even seem that interested in the wedding itself, and the fact that the groom is practically frothing at the mouth is only a temporary oddity—they are caught in their own tempest, their inebriation echoing the storm outside in a feedback loop of pathetic fallacy, echoing a drive to live now, forget the past, and deny tomorrow. It is animalistic and corporeal, edging past what might conceivably be deemed ‘fun.’ When the sun rises, after all is done, they stumble across the fields of the village, at one point crossing paths with (even literally bumping into) a funeral party, the solemnity of the latter in such stark contrast to the absent respect of the former. And isn’t the lack of respect for what has come before, for the dead, at the heart of the ghost story?

The films follows a rather odd trajectory, the second act building in emotional intensity as first Piotr loses himself, and then Hana, speaking through him, is confronted with the disappearance of all that she ever knew. And then suddenly, they are gone. Really and truly – we never see either of them again. Everything unravels, but not in the hot explosion the previous rising action would have suggested, but rather the listless, slurring, drunken blackout that everyone has coming. Some go searching for Piotr/Hana, and at night, the streets are filled with fog, illuminated by searchlights, and it is beautiful and sad. The professor reminisces aloud about all that is gone, the world and community of his youth. These ghosts now walk the streets-we don’t see them, but the presence of absence is felt. The following morning, Żaneta’s father implores the guests that “we must forget what we never saw” – that there was no wedding – (there literally is no groom, after all), they were never there, he was never there. This is all just a dream that all will soon wake from and then everything will be clear.  The accusing bones are once again covered with dirt; the world now is the only world that is and there is no reason to ever question how it came to be that way.

This is an interesting spin on the idea of the haunting. In an American context, we have endless tales of “Indian Burial Grounds,” of the original genocidal sin of America, the blood staining the land and dooming endless generations of nice enough, middle class white people to unpleasant interactions with newly acquired real estate which they never could have afforded if not for the stink lingering from past crimes and which they now can’t afford to leave, no matter how the walls may bleed or the flies may buzz.  In the European context, history is long, and regardless of where you step, you will find yourself on land that was, at some point, stolen bloodily from someone else. And yet, relatively recent history (WWII, the Holocaust, etc.) looms especially large, certainly in Poland, a country which felt the effects of this history as few places did. Trauma still inhabits the land, and even if those holding property now did nothing unethical to acquire it (though some did – without casting any aspersions on the whole, some individuals will always be selfish and cruel), the murders of former owners linger, haunt. And at the same time, there is a vibrant, modern life going on, which needs to thrive and can’t exist constantly beholden to the past, to sadness.

I think Demon dwells in these contradictions, in this tension between the forgetting which is necessary to live and laugh and move forward and the memory which is a vital responsibility, often shirked. It is not a scary movie, but I would consider it horror. More significantly, it’s a stunning little picture, and it’s a shame that Wrona will never make another.

Polish Horror Series # 3 – Mother Joan of the Angels

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So I am continuing my journey through the horror output (or more frequently, as is the case today, horror adjacent output) of this country in which I’ve made my home (you can check out the first two films here and here). It’s an interesting process, bringing a number of films to my attention I might never have otherwise encountered, and today’s entry really justifies doing a project like this. I’m sure some English speaking cinephiles will know this one (I read that Scorcese is a fan), but I had never heard of it until I started this series and asked some Polish friends for recommendations. The world is so wide and there is so much to discover when you start digging in any one place. As a caveat, this can only barely be considered a “horror movie” but it is pretty amazing. If you want some gore, check out last week’s entry on Zombie. So, without further adieu,…

Matka Joanna od Aniołów (1961)

While Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s film may not exactly be horror, it does include enough elements to justify consideration here: mass demonic possession, a double axe murder, a surreal, uncanny setting that feels out of place and time, the lingering horror of witch burnings, and an intense struggle with the demons within – with the dark drives that one may be drawn to, defined by, and drowned in, losing all sense of self.  Also, it dovetails so perfectly with another not-quite-horror-but-still-dealing-with-witch-trials-and-mass-possession classic, Ken Russell’s 1971 The Devils. They are both based on the same historical event, the witch trials of Loudun, France in 1634, with The Devils culminating in the burning at the stake of Father Grandier and Mother Joan being directly preceded by this event. Only in this case, following the novel by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, the action has been moved to Poland, removing the political issues inherent to France at that time (Richelieu and such), and thus shifting the theme to something both more personal and spiritually allegorical.

And what a visually striking piece. The cinematography is so stark, so spare; the blacks are deep and inky and the whites almost hurt the eyes. The landscape surrounding the convent where all the action takes place seems somehow lunar – rocky and sandy, devoid of life, pitted with craters. It feels like we are out of the world – in an other space where these questions of self and desire and good and evil and love and life can play out, free from the minutiae of living. References are made to a forest, but it is never seen, never felt – and it seems almost impossible to imagine someplace green and dark and wet from the vantage point of this barren space. I suppose that is fitting for the convent – a place that is meant to be a retreat from the world.

The story centers on a priest, Father Suryn, who has come to help with the exorcism of the Mother Superior of the convent, Mother Joanna (the same part played by Vanessa Redgrave in Russell’s film). The impression is that as leader of the convent, the other nuns follow her lead and are only as possessed as she shows herself to be. Interestingly, I feel that the film never declared with certainty whether anything supernatural is actually happening here. Is Joanna, as she declares, possessed by eight powerful demons, and by extension, are the other nuns possessed as well? Is this a kind of mass hysteria? Is this a kind of liberatory performance, allowing these cloistered, repressed women the freedom to act out – to be wild, to be angry, to be silly? The film even seems disinterested in tackling these questions – I don’t think it’s really the point.

It doesn’t matter what is true – it only matters what people do in their present situations. Perhaps there really are “demons” but they are merely the oft-denied aspects of human nature which, under sufficient repression, must finally explode and reassert themselves. What the characters do with these impulses and how they interact with each other – torment each other – seduce each other – love each other – or rob each other along the way is really at the heart of the piece.

And there is real contrast between the main players here. When we first meet Father Suryn, as played by Mieczysław Voit, in a local inn across from the convent, he is shown against the backdrop of a collection of villagers and others who have travelled from afar to see the spectacle of the possessed nuns (though one bemoans the fact that they never take off their clothes and complains that they should have gone to see a tightrope walker instead).  All of them are so folksy, earthy, grotesque and funny – everything that he is not.  He slices his bread as thin as paper so as not to partake in gluttony and he seems to own only one possession, his cat o’ nine tails, with which he self-flagellates.  On his way to the convent the first time, he talks with the local priest who now cares for the illegitimate children of Father Grandier, a priest who really lived in the world. Near the ashen stake on which Grandier had been burned, a striking black structure standing out in this white expanse, Suryn asks the priest to pray for him before he must do battle with the “evil one.” Shrugging, the father makes a half-hearted sign of the cross and calls the kids to go home, leaving Suryn kneeling alone. His world is not one of dark spirits and grand meaning – there are children to feed and care for, and beer to drink.

Suryn continues to the convent and in this moment, we have a touch of horror. The place is ominous. He is clearly frightened. And the mood of the whole piece is tense and overpowering. And then he meets Joanna and there is a kind of spark. Intelligence flashes in her eyes – whether that of a good soul beset upon by evil forces, or an alien awareness housed behind her own, or the light of independence and defiance; she captivates him. Lucyna Winnicka is quite magnetic here in the title role, lightly dancing between a sweet young girl in need of help, a demonic, sweaty, rough talking visage of evil, and a powerful woman, certain in her powers, satisfied with her choices, defying the world, and proud of her apparent “sin.”

We then see her in relation to the other nuns who seem to model their on plight on hers. A key scene takes place about halfway through the film when some visiting churchmen (whose presence has preceded Suryn) lead an exorcism mass in the church. First we see in close up, one by one, the line of nuns making their way to the service – on each face, we can read different emotions – anger, sadness, fear, confusion, and one of them just keeps spinning in circles. They enter the church and spread out in a kind of phalanx behind Joanna, and it is an intimidating image.  The priests chase them around with holy water and they shriek and hide, all but Mother Joanna standing rebelliously before the altar, and one nun who has been unaffected by the possessions – Sister Małgorzata, to whom I shall return in a bit. The focus then shifts to Joanna. They pray at her; they tie her down and shove crosses in her face, commanding her various demons to vacate the premises. In turn, she gives no ground.

She occasionally plays along, at one point, leading the rest of the sisters in an odd dance of hysteria, in which you can so clearly see how they are watching her and trying to copy, however imprecisely, her movements. At one moment, she reaches her arms up as if in prayer, only to bend over backwards into a bridge, and a horror fan has to wonder if this moment was directly stolen by Friedkin for the Exorcist “spider-walk” twelve years later. At the end, a temporary peace is achieved as Joanna leads the others in prostrating themselves on the ground, lying face down, arms out in prayer. It’s an evocative image, but what has happened? Is this an act of submission or subversion – even in apparent defeat, exerting her influence over the other women of the convent?

Following this outburst, Joanna is separated from the other sisters and their condition seems to immediately improve. Much of the rest of the film consists in private scenes between Joanna and Suryn as he determinedly seeks her “salvation” whether this is something that interests her or not. It’s noteworthy to me that for a film this visual, I felt compelled to transcribe a lot of the dialogue as, even in translation, it is thought provoking and stirring. We get a sense of how this possession frees her, gives her life, makes her special:

“Who am I? A poor servant of the lord – who worships him in a remote convent? I am just a nun. Even though my father is a duke, our family is impoverished. He stays in the Smolensk marshes and nobody knows him. Who am I? A poor nun. And yet eight powerful demons possessed me.”

As a nun, she is already outside of the world, and possessed, she is free from any expectations or restrictions that would remain to her. She loves her devils, her freedom. She takes pride in them, in it. In this sense of liberation, I had another modern resonance, namely of Eggers’s The VVitch. I think Joanna perhaps “wouldst like the taste of butter.” In a later scene, she declares how “this possession gives [her] joy” and lashes out at Suryn who would seek to steal it away from her:

“You only want me to calm down, to become grayer, smaller, to be exactly like all the other nuns.”

Her plight is somewhat reflected in the story of Sister Małgorzata, the one nun unaffected by all of the apparently spiritual activity. We first meet her as she’s slipped out of the convent to visit the inn and gossip with her friend. She is joyful, in the world, and full of life, and she doesn’t need demons to be self-possessed. In the inn, she drinks some vodka with the villagers and meets a handsome visiting noble, here to view the local sensation. Coquettishly, she sings a sweet song about how ‘she would rather be a nun than to have a brute for a husband who would beat her black and blue with his stick because he thinks she needs a beating, no, she’d rather be a nun.’ But obviously, she wouldn’t. She is stuck here at the end of the world and craves love and life, and she feels she has found her way out in sweet flirtation with the nobleman. Sadly, by the end of the film he has had his way with her and escaped before dawn, leaving her “ruined.” Even still, she declares that she will not return to the convent. She does not want that, even after her recent love lost.

Love, or something like it, is also in the air for Joanna and Father Suryn. There is a clear attraction, a chemistry, between them. In one scene, having relocated their private exorcisms to an attic space, divided by white habits hanging to dry, they both whip themselves, scouring the flesh to purify the spirit, or possibly just finding physical and emotional release together in the only acceptable fashion available to them. Afterwards, they dress and exit the attic together shyly and sweetly, like first time lovers. Then Joanne takes it a step too far by trying to kiss the priest’s hand and he flees (his own desires as much as hers).

And there is much talk of love as we reach the climax of both the possession story and their emotional journey. (A warning – while this film is not primarily a vehicle for plot, this next part is certainly a spoiler) Claiming to be motivated by love (for her, for God, for “the good”), the priest takes her demons into himself (again, presaging the end of The Exorcist) and falls down the stairs. Everyone now knows that she has been freed of her affliction and that the demons now reside in a new host. To be sure that his new infernal residents will never leave him, Suryn goes on to brutally murder two servants with an axe while they sleep among the hay in the barn. The film doesn’t show us the actual violence, but rather the reactions of two horses who watch in terror. It’s an effective choice.

But what was this love? Did he really feel for her (maybe he did) or, for all that he had berated her for the sin of pride in loving the attention that she received thanks to her possessed state, has he demonstrated himself to be even more proud, claiming for himself the ultimate mantle of both suffering and heroism, and in the process, stealing from her that which she cherished most? There had been a real impression of connection between them, and in this act, he has robbed her of his intimacy and affections, as well as her freedom. Perhaps that was his intention – if he has the demons within (either spiritual or metaphorical), she cannot; she must be saved, whether she wants it or not.

Either way, we do return to some solid moments of horror in the killing, in Małgorzata discovering him holding the axe, and in a final moment of the Sister and the Mother weeping together as the churchbell (meant to call to lost travelers, wandering in the forest) rings, but while we may see the bell, the soundtrack is only their cries; no traveler is saved – all must wander still.

It is quite a piece, and one which lends itself to multiple readings. I feel I come to this from a modern perspective and in it see a story of frustrated liberation, of joy in defiance, of a claim of love which is actually greed. But I have read an interview with the director in which he indicated primarily a love story. How would this have been received in 1961 in Catholic Poland? (Apparently, the Communist authorities were fine with it, but the church decried it as ‘anti-clerical.’) Is it more of a horror story (or more of a love story, for that matter) if you actually believe in demons? In any case, the style feels so symbolic, so poetic, that it feels truly open for interpretation. We are free even if poor Joanna, ultimately, is not – free to find what meaning we will, or lack of meaning, as the case may be.

Polish Horror Series #2 – Lokis

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OK, so since starting this series two weeks ago, I’ve had little time to take in more films on my list. Finally this weekend, trapped by howling winds without and ill health within (yup – it’s our turn to stay home with Covid – but so far, we’re more or less ok), I had the chance to sit down and have a viewing of another new-to-me Polish horror film. Ok, it might not exactly be horror, but it is Polish, it is a film, and it certainly exists in a degree of dialogue with other examples of Folk Horror. It is also quite a fascinating little flick, and possibly includes a touch of arctothropy (which I may have just made up – it’s my best guess for the bear based counterpart of lycanthropy). For the time being, it’s streaming on Shudder. Before I get to writing about it, I do want to say that the film looks fantastic but that the stills I’ve found online don’t do it justice and getting screenshots from Shudder doesn’t work well.  Imagine a far more visually striking film, won’t you…

Lokis – Rękopis profesora Wittembacha (1970)

Another piece set in the 19th century, this time in what is present day Lithuania, Lokis – the Manuscript of Professor Wittembach is an interesting, little, mildly-horror-adjacent piece, written and directed by Janusz Majewski, adapted from the novel by Prosper Mérimée, the French author upon whose novel the opera Carmen is based. While it is not strictly (or, really, at all, a horror film) it does follow so many of the patterns of one model of folk horror (which is why it is included in the boxed set, All the Haunts be Ours), namely, the “civilized” protagonist venturing into a more rural – wild region and taking in its folksy charm, peculiar superstitions, comical local characters, and the foreboding sense that there is something to the old stories and that the world is a more unknowable, threatening, and simply odd place than previously imagined.

We start the journey with Professor Wittembach, a German pastor and ethnographic scholar who is journeying to the wilds of Lithuania to study local languages and customs.  He begins this sojourn on a train and, set to some really striking and ominous orchestration from Wojciech Kilar (who genre fans will be most familiar with for his score to Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula), the opening credits roll to an evocatively symbolic image. The professor has taken off his glasses and left them next to the window of the train. As the vehicle moves east, all is obscured, except that which is viewed through the lenses of modernity, of reason (either that, or perhaps it refers to the limits of his perception-it could go either way, but it does look meaningful and it does look cool).

He reaches his destination, the palace of Count Szemiot, a mysterious, mercurial, and sometimes quite inscrutable figure who is first glimpsed spying on the professor from a tree. In a tower of the castle, the Count’s mother is locked up, shrieking, calling for her son to be killed for the monster he is. The Count’s doctor (when he isn’t treating the mother for madness by dunking her in water between bouts of folk songs) eventually recounts to Wittembach the local tale of how the Count’s mother was abducted and raped by a bear, and that the Count was the result of this assault. Whether or not this implausible story should be given credence, the film suggests its possibility, without ever explicitly establishing the truth.

While I don’t think it could be argued that this is really a horror film, there is an interesting balance struck between the comic specificity of the many odd characters the professor comes across (drunk, superstitious, crazy, or just plain weird), and a real sense that he has come to a dangerous place and is among unstable people (who are drunk, superstitious, crazy, and just plain weird).  Additionally, there is a feeling of the uncanny, a kind of unreality, in the proceedings– at least for the professor, and, through him, the viewer; for most of the locals, the folk beliefs are taken more on face value and are generally unquestioned.

For the Count, around whom the action turns, objective truth seems beside the point as he is focused on more philosophical-poetic issues of “man’s dual nature,” of the line (if it exists at all) between civilization and animal barbarity, between the human and the bestial. In a telling moment, he explains to the professor, “I have no love for animals. They’re no better than people.” The film, I think, shares his focus, and his dim view of humanity, juxtaposing the laughable though often lovely beliefs, dances, and reactions of the common people with the cruelty of the lord of the manor and the cold detachment of the educated interlopers (the doctor and the professor).

All in all, the film features many captivating elements. The cinematography is adroit – full of gorgeously filmed landscapes, cleverly framed shots (lots of reflective surfaces here), and seventies-tastic snap zooms. Again, please take my word for it, or watch it for yourself.  The pictures I’m attaching unfortunately ill serve the filmmaking. The score is rich, driving, and enigmatic and the production design feels lived in and complete – though I really can’t speak to its historical accuracy.

Most importantly, the nuance and charm of its characters mostly sustain it through its general lack of narrative drive, and it cultivates a rich atmosphere which even occasionally touches on the gothic, such as an early scene in a broken church, lit by lightning strikes and candle light, and housing a skeleton with suspiciously sharp teeth. In its specificity of character and place, it is also frequently hilarious. Again, the Count gets some of the best moments, such as when, to mark the occasion of his wedding, he “releases all of his prisoners.” This entails bringing a large cart into the courtyard of the palace and opening countless cages featuring trapped animals – hawks, cats, ferrets, foxes, and many others, before an old crazy witch woman who we had previously met in the forest climbs out and runs off jabbering wildly and cursing his name.  The bit with the animals was a little odd for his many guests, but the revelation that he’d been keeping this poor, mad old lady locked up with his trophy animals was truly shocking. He simply responds to his former prisoner’s curses with a disappointed, “that’s gratitude for you.”

Additionally, the little elements of folk culture shine: a wild group dance in a local village – a strangely expressive interpretive waltz performed by aristocrats, acting out a tale of Rusalki (water nymphs that lure men into the reeds and drown them) right before the doctor mirrors this by spying on peasant girls bathing among the reeds – the degree to which the story of the bear and the Count’s mother is accepted as fact, and even relayed with some erotic charge, an odd moment when, before entering the church, the bride to be is slapped so there could later be grounds for divorce if necessary. These details bring a lot of local color.

And the film is certainly about something.  The Count’s aforementioned trapping and later freeing of wild animals seems to reflect his own ambivalence towards the wildness of his own nature – restrained, denied, waiting to run free – wanting to strike out, to taste blood. Without going into details, the film ends on a bleak note, and this has less to do with a moment of final act violence than it does with a conversation between the doctor and the professor. The professor asks the doctor why, if he so well understood the many potentially dangerous problems of the Count’s family, he did so little to heal them. Basically, the physician explains that he hates them, as he does himself, as he generally does humanity writ large, and their suffering gave him some small entertainment. Then the doctor turns the same question on the professor – as a pastor, as a man of god, why did he do so little to comfort them? Wittembach has no reply. No one is actually good: man or bear, the cultured or the barbaric – he returns home having documented something of eastern folklore, but really bringing back an awareness of his own lack – of a void in his own center. There is a haunting quality to it all.

I will say, however, and I don’t want to fall into criticism, but I feel the film did miss a trick. While it all circles around a tension between the bestial and the human – reason and madness – passion (whether it be lust or rage) and sensibility, the piece as a whole is quite reserved, meditative even. There are small bursts of life, but I think it would have benefitted from giving in a bit more to the barbarity so often discussed by its inhabitants. Perhaps the idea was that, just as the Count imprisoned the animals, the potential savagery of the story was similarly restrained and restricted. While this may be symbolically and intellectually sound, I think the effect of the film would have been stronger with a bit more bloodthirstiness.  Maybe I wouldn’t have this note if I weren’t writing this for a horror blog – no one can say for sure – but I think I would. As it is, it was frequently quite watchable and even enjoyable, while revolving around interesting themes, but I would have loved it to have more fully embodied them. Still – an interesting and rewarding watch.

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As an aside, I was happy to have the Rusalki referenced, and the dance scene that does so is weird and wonderful. It seemed unfortunately misleading that the subtitles simply translated it to “mermaid,” which I think really gives a false impression. The Rusalka is a really evocative folk figure – capturing the allure and the threat of local nature – that comes up in a lot of other media. I probably first encountered them in the above painting by Pruszkowski (note the one victim trampled on the ground and the next watching them through the reeds) and more recently, there’s a really fun Decemberists song about a Rusalka. Just wanted to share.

Polish Horror Series # 1 – Wilczyca

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So, back in 2008, I relocated to Poland.  I’d been living in Chicago for the previous 7 years and felt the need to shake things up.  My background being in the theatre, my only real association with Poland had been due to some theatre artists, largely already dead, who had made a deep impression on me and I just had the general sense that this might be someplace with interesting art and theatre and culture, so I signed up for a course in teaching English as a foreign language, bought a one way ticket, and took off. It wasn’t long before I met the woman who would later become my wife and found myself ensconced in my new life here.

Being a horror fan, I’d been very interested to sample the local fares in that domain. The only problem is that there aren’t many of them, and those that exist are a) hard to find and/or b) lacking English subtitles. (My Polish is passable in some contexts, but it should be better…) So, I was really happy to see that along with the excellent folk horror documentary, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, which recently came to Shudder, there are two therein referenced Polish films (also included in Severin film’s box set, All the Haunts be Ours): Wilczyca and Lokis, Rekopis profesora Wittembacha.  Wilczyca had long been on my radar but I hadn’t been able to find it anywhere, so I was really happy to finally have a chance to check it out over the weekend.

And with that, I’d like to start a recurring series here on ye ol’ blog.  Of the really-not-many Polish horror films in existence, there are a few that I’d long ago given up on tracking down. I think that, as I’m not planning on moving anytime soon, I should finally dig further into this aspect of local culture and work my way through the limited catalogue (really, there are probably about 30-40 feature films to choose from in total and that includes some pretty cheap, student film looking entries). So, starting with today’s post, I’m going to occasionally highlight a Polish horror (or, more frequently, horror adjacent) flick.  Sometimes that will be a longer text and sometimes, it will be more of a blurb length short review, depending on how much I can say about the given film.  So, without further adieu, let’s get into…

Wilczyca (She-wolf) (1982)

Wintry and atmospheric, this is less the “Polish werewolf movie” that I’d heard tell of, and more a historical drama with folkloric/horror elements. Marek Piestrak’s film is also an interestingly small, and yet effective little picture, showcasing striking cinematography, key concerns of Polish history, and a couple of standout performances; all in all, an odd, sometimes enigmatic, sometimes sexually charged, sometimes outdated-in-terms-of-gender-politics little package.

In short, Kacper Wosiński, a veteran of an early 19th century uprising (from the late 1700s until the end of WWI, Poland was off the map, its territory divvied up between Austria, Prussia, and Russia – during that time there were a number of uprisings, attempting to expel the occupying forces), returns home after a long absence to find his estranged wife, Maryna, dying due to complications from a botched self-performed abortion. On her death bed, she curses him, clutching a wolf’s paw, refuses last rites, and promises to return to haunt him, before finally passing. We don’t have the full story, but from some of his later dialogue, we understand that he had been some charming combination of abusive and neglectful, and her venom feels justified.

His brother insists that a stake be driven through her heart before burial, doing so himself, as Kacper is unable. It is here that we first have a touch of horror. The folklore is not exactly precise – it seems that if not dealt with appropriately, there is the fear that she will rise – as something like a werewolf, or a witch, or a vampire, or something unnamed and undefined, but bad, and vengeful, and powerful. The scene is uncomfortable and effective. Kacper is not exactly sympathetic, but his reluctance to desecrate his wife’s corpse is emotional and the ugliness of the situation is solid. However, perhaps because Kacper couldn’t carry out this responsibility himself, the stake will prove ineffective.

After all this, Kacper leaves his home, never to return and reconnects with his friend Ludwig, a fellow veteran of the uprising who now has to flee the Viennese partition into Prussia, presumably due to revolutionary activities (apparently in the novel on which this is based, he was fleeing the Russian authorities, but as Poland was still under Communism at the time of filming, they had to change the bad guys to Austrians).  After helping his friend to the border, and possibly seeing his dead wife/wolf/just-the-wind-and-fog at the crossroads, he returns to Ludwig’s estate to look after it for him and, in terms of Ludwig’s own young wife, Julia, to “protect his honor,” a task which he rather fails at as she immediately takes up with an old flame, Otto, a Viennese officer.

And here, we get to the heart of the movie, for Julia so closely reflects and even directly resembles Maryna (in fact, they are both played by Iwona Bielska, who is pretty stellar in the dual roles) that he comes to feel that she is possessed by the spirit of his wicked spouse, becoming a wolf at night, taunting him, haunting him, and possibly eating his beloved dogs (a warning: there is a scene with a wounded dog that looked concerningly realistic—I don’t know what filming practices were at the time, but I really hope it was ok).

For her part, Bielska is an absolute treat. While the film is not necessarily good to its two female characters (I’m not sure exactly how to read things, but I suspect we’re supposed to be on Kacper’s side, but are we, really?), she is gloriously villainous and deliciously cruel, with a spark of wicked intelligence twinkling in her eyes.  Her performance really is quite magnetic – sensual, playful, and often kinkily evil (a nigh vampiric flashback of her lustily feasting on the blood of Otto’s wounded hand after a wolf bite comes to mind). There was even a surprising queer note as she is first introduced in an intimate moment with her maid (to be fair, it’s not exactly very positive representation, as it is perhaps meant to portray her selfish hedonism—but it was still a surprising inclusion).

Anyway, Kacper becomes convinced that she must be dealt with, being his responsibility twice over, and silver bullets in hand, he moves to do so, driving the film towards an unanticipatedly bloody climax.

As may already be clear, I’m not entirely sure what to make of this film, or how to read it. Is it a straightforward, folk-influenced historical drama about a man set upon by dark forces, rising to repel them? Is it a more complex story of that same man forced to reckon with the consequences of his own bad actions? Is Julia possessed by Kacper’s dead wife and definitely an evil supernatural entity (it seems clear that she is the “she-wolf,” but her taste for blood play that we see in the flashback with Otto certainly pre-dates Maryna’s death)? Are we supposed to read the two female characters as (however alluring and compelling) essentially wicked antagonists and cheer Kacper’s actions or are we to doubt his convictions and dread violence being done to Julia as Kacper is triggered by her infidelity reflecting that of his former wife?  

Are the characters even really people or is it all perhaps allegorical? When Ludwig has to leave, Julia expresses frustration that his “patriotic” activities occupy him so much – do the women represent some natural, self-centered national impulse, focused on the body and sensual pleasure, which does not support and thus, undercuts attempts at revolution? Or is it possible that this is actually critical of those partisans who, in heady patriotic fervor, neglect the self, family, and actual people, as opposed to ideals? The film has a flavor of allegory, even if these readings are not intended, and the degree to which these questions abound, left it lingering in my mind.

All in all, this was an interesting watch, what these days would be called a ‘slow burn’ – rich in atmosphere and performances, sparse in terms of plot, drawing on a strong sense of place and history and character. It is only vaguely a “horror” movie, but it does have enough elements to be included: the staking scene, the appearance of Maryna (somewhat zombified) at the crossroads, the suggestion of the supernatural in terms of Julia, and her knowing, animalistic villainy.  It’s never in a hurry to get anywhere, but I found it totally watchable throughout.

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So, that’s the first of these.  I won’t be doing one every week, but in the coming months, I’d like to return to this series periodically and both write about the other Polish horror films I’ve seen and search out some more that are new to me. Hey – if you happen to be Polish and have a suggestion of something I should look for, please drop a line!