🇵🇱Poland

Polish horror's identity has long been shaped less by domestic production than by the international careers of its émigré filmmakers — most famously Roman Polanski, whose Apartment Trilogy (*Repulsion*, *Rosemary's Baby*, *The Tenant*) was produced abroad in the UK, US, and France respectively, and Andrzej Żuławski, whose French-Polish-German *Possession* (1981) is widely cited as one of horror's most transgressive films. The major domestic landmark of the period was Jerzy Kawalerowicz's Mother Joan of the Angels (1961), a black-and-white possession drama set in a 17th-century Polish convent that won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes and helped establish the nunsploitation template that *The Devils* and *Alucarda* would later inherit.

Polish horror was largely dormant through the Communist era and the post-1989 transition. A contemporary revival began with Marcin Wrona's Demon (2015), a possession horror set at a wedding in rural Poland where the groom is taken over by a dybbuk — a Jewish folkloric spirit, in a film explicitly engaging the country's unresolved Holocaust history. Wrona took his own life days after the film's Polish premiere, which has since become one of the most-studied post-war Polish films of any genre. Agnieszka Smoczyńska's The Lure (2015), a flesh-eating-mermaid musical set in 1980s Warsaw, brought Polish folk horror into a register no other national cinema was producing.

Adrian Panek's Werewolf (2019), in which Holocaust orphans liberated from a Nazi concentration camp must survive both feral guard dogs and one another, demonstrated that Polish horror's most fertile territory is the country's 20th-century trauma reread through genre conventions. Across this contemporary wave, Polish horror has consistently treated supernatural threat as a vehicle for examining the country's unfinished reckoning with its Catholic heritage, its Jewish past, and the wars that have repeatedly remade its borders.