Horror as Folk: Changing Shapes with Wilczyca (1983) and Lokis (1970)

The (many) films in Severin’s folk horror bundle, All the Haunts Be Ours are presented in one of two ways. Some occupy discs of their own, while others are nestled together, two to a disc. These latter are usually grouped by the region from which they hail, but few of them fit together better than these two slow-moving Polish flicks about shapeshifters which, despite being separated by more than a decade, almost feel like they could have come from the same filmography.

The way they are positioned in the set, you will watch Wilczyca first, even though it came out some thirteen years later than Lokis. Released under a bewildering array of alternate titles, almost all of which involve the word “wolf,” Wilczyca is how it is listed in All the Haunts Be Ours, so that’s how we’ll refer to it here – even if I have to stop and check my spelling every single time I type it.

Set in 1848, in a rural part of Poland, Wilczyca has as its backdrop the Springtime of Nations, a series of uprising and revolutions which took place throughout Europe at the time. It’s okay if you don’t know anything about that – I didn’t – but knowledge of it might help or hinder your enjoyment of Wilczyca, I couldn’t say. What is relevant about it is the way that the film uses the uncertainty and inherent danger of the situation to its advantage. War of any kind is, after all, a surreal and liminal space, and setting a story of supernatural horror against it is pretty much always effective.

Take, for example, what is probably the film’s most potent set piece, an almost Bava-esque trip through the fog where very little that’s supernatural actually happens, besides one brief and effective ghostly glimpse. However, the peril and disquiet of the characters’ situation heightens the dread and renders the sequence spookier than supernatural manifestations would probably have managed.

It’s easy enough, from the titles and synopses, to assume that Wilczyca is a werewolf movie, but if you go into it expecting that, you’re likely to be disappointed. It’s probably got more in common with Viy than any werewolf film, and it draws from a variety of regional folklore, with dashes of witchcraft, vampirism, The Book of Abramelin, and elements of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, to name a few.

A dying wife very memorably curses her husband on her deathbed. “You called me a bitch and I’ll die like a bitch,” she spits at him. But he won’t be rid of her that easily. She dies clutching a severed wolf’s paw to her chest, and she promises to come back as a wolf. And maybe she does. Or maybe she comes back as the bisexual and promiscuous wife of her dead husband’s former buddy from the revolution, who has come farther in the world and takes on our mustachioed protagonist as a sort of aide-de-camp. It’s all a little vague but if you have trouble following it, watch out, because our next movie is about to outvague it to hell and back.

Lokis: A Manuscript of Professor Wittembach is frequently represented online by a very weird poster image featuring a man’s features bisected and merged with the jaws and claws of – presumably, from the contents of the film – a bear. Directed by Janusz Majewski (a glance at his filmography reveals a lot of weird posters), Lokis is adapted from the novel of the same name by Prosper Merimee, which is also credited as the inspiration for Walerian Borowczyk’s classic pornographic film The Beast from 1975.

While there’s a little nudity in Lokis, there’s no pornography, but that doesn’t mean that weird sexual themes don’t run through it every bit as intensely as they do through Wilczyca. The Professor Wittembach of the title is a pastor who is researching the folk customs of the Lithuanian countryside when he is invited to stay with a local count.

The count is an odd duck, possibly owing to the strange story behind his conception. It seems that his mother was attacked by a bear and, nine months later, gave birth to her son. From the moment of her attack, she was rendered insane, and her son’s birth only made things worse. She called him a monster and tried to kill him. Was she right? That is, of course, the central question of the film – but not one that Lokis is in any hurry to explore.

While the movie is definitely and undeniably weird, it is weird much more in the Peter Strickland vein than the H. P. Lovecraft one. While an argument could be made that the supernatural phenomena of Wilczyca are purely subjective, its striking final image seems to swing the pendulum the other way. Not so with Lokis. It is, if anything, probably more likely that the count is mentally disturbed than that he is a were-bear, though once again the film ends on a final frame that may at least raise doubts.

Both movies have many things in common. They are glacially slow, focused on an outsider who comes into a big house and observes (and is caught up in) the fraught relationships of the inhabitants. They are both beautifully shot, and they both involve themes of shape-shifting. They also have some extremely weird psychosexual politics on their minds – sometimes mired in with run-of-the-mill politics, especially in Wilczyca.

Perhaps most importantly for our purposes here, both Lokis and Wilczyca are emphatically folk horror. They are steeped in the folklore of the regions in which they take place, and the folk beliefs of their characters serve not only as thematic underpinnings and explanations, but lend themselves to the structure of the tale. For evidence, look no further than one of Wilczyca’s rare scare scenes, which is framed as a ghost story being told by one character to another.