The Beast of History: Human to Animal and Animal to Human Transformations in Polish Horror Films
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".