The Beast of History - Human to Animal and Animal to Human Transformations in Polish Horror Films

Aug 21, 2026

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Comparative analysis links four Polish horror films—two from the communist period and two recent productions—through their recurring metamorphosis between human and animal forms. The study reads these transformations as a symptom of repressed national fears, especially anxiety surrounding political, ideological, and social change during Poland’s turbulent history. Using theoretical frameworks such as Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming, Derrida and other thinkers on the human and non-human, Freud’s uncanny, and Žižek’s Radical Evil, the essay argues that depictions of subjectivity reveal an unresolved, problematic collective approach to history.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages25

Reading Time1 h 3 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Comparative film analysis

Metamorphosis and subjectivity

Theoretical frameworks

Polish historical context and horror

Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies (LLIDS) ISSN: 2547-0044 [ellids.com/archives/2020/07/3.4-Jezyk.pd](ellids.com/archives/2020/07/3.4-Jezyk.pdf)[f](ellids.com/archives/2020/07/3.4-Jezyk.pdf) CC Attribution-No Derivatives 4.0 International License [www.ellids.com](www.ellids.com) The Beast of History: Human to Animal and Animal to Human Transformations in Polish Horror Films Agnieszka Jeżyk Abstract This essay presents a comparative analyses of four Polish horror films—two from the communist period: Lokis: A Manuscript of Professor Wittembach (1970) by Janusz Majewski, and Marek Piestrak’s The Return of the She-wolf (1990), and two recent works: The Lure (2015) by Agnieszka Smoczyńska and Werewolf (2018) by Adrian Panek. In the context of the marginal popularity of the horror genre in Poland, the essay finds their focus on human to animal or animal to human metamorphosis intriguing, and studies it as a symptom of repressed national fears. It argues that what is subjugated in particular through this type of narratives is the anxiety of political, ideological, and social change. In this interpretation of the seemingly non-historical films, the essay will demonstrate that these surprisingly common depictions of transformations of subjectivity serve as vessels that expose the problematic approach of collective Polish consciousness to history. Some of the theoretical concepts used in the essay are Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of becoming as well as their demonic animal, Jacques Derrida’s, Alexandre Kojève’s, and Georgio Agamben’s insights on human and non-human subjects and language, Freud’s uncanny, and Žižek’s interpretation of the Radical Evil in the context of Holocaust. Keywords: Metamorphosis, Transgression, Subjectivity, Polish Horror Films, Cinema of Dread, Polish History, Animal Studies Do you desire a healthy man, do you want to have him disciplined, stable, and safe? Well then, wrap him in darkness, idleness, and heaviness. We have to become as stupid as the animals to become wise; blinded, to be guided. – Montaigne (qtd. in Birnbaum and Olsson 81) “Chess Pieces on the Chessboard”: Polish Cinema and the Impossible Horror “In Anglosaxon culture, storytelling is a basis. It’s about dragging the viewer into the game. We [Poles] don’t have this skill,” claims the director Jacek Koprowicz in the interview given to Paweł JóźwiakRodan (Jóźwiak-Rodan). Later he speculates about possible reasons for this serious deficiency: “Maybe it is some genetic defect that we are simply unable to tell stories. Maybe it is connected to the fact that historically we have always experienced failures, disintegration is inscribed in us, and we cannot construct anything.” Similar is the view of Bolesław Michałek, who, in a 1967 article “We are Different, Weird”1 points out the idiosyncratic position of the Polish cinematography so heavily reliant on the geographical location, the difficulty of the language, and historical circumstances: “Polish film is haunted by a ghost of historical fatalism. It has aesthetical consequences. For example, in Polish film protagonists as such don’t exist [...] they are chess pieces on the chessboard”(Michałek 3–4) . Even if Koprowicz’s diagnosis appears a little too far-fetched, Michałek’s account proves symptomatic of Polish cinema. Polish cinematography, compared to American tradition, unquestionably lacks versatility in horror story-telling, and consequently such movies, which follow the specific objectives ofthe genre, inhabit a very thin margin of cultural production even today (Fiołek-Lubczyńska 2014) . In Polish films, a vampire, a zombie, or a madman with a chainsaw has the face of a Nazi or Soviet occupier, the tales of metaphysics elevate the battle of good and evil to the realm of a writer’s or artist’s moral dilemmas, and the unknown is usually quite familiar embodied in historical or political forces destroying the nation. However, it can also be argued th

FAQs

Which Polish horror films are compared in the essay?

The essay compares two communist-era films—Lokis: A Manuscript of Professor Wittembach (1970) and The Return of the She-wolf (1990)—with two more recent works: The Lure (2015) and Werewolf (2018).

Why does the essay connect Polish horror cinema with history?

It argues that Poland’s partitions, uprisings, World War II, Stalinism, and the fall of communism form the background and intensify the genre’s moral anxiety, making past and present not mutually exclusive with horror aesthetics.

Aug 21, 2026

Upload by Maeve