Getting possessed by a dybbuk on your wedding day? Doesn’t sound very fun! Courtesy of The Orchard.It’s October, and I could not be more excited! Yes, I’m a horror movie buff. I love Halloween. Pumpkins. Autumn. Fall. Dressing up. Horror movies. Good horror movies. Bad horror movies. Gory horror movies. Psychological horror movies with no gore. You tell me about a new horror movie, I’m the first one in the theater. (You bet I’m seeing Halloween Ends in a few weeks.) This month, I figure it’s best to start off the blog revisiting a very underrated movie, Demon (2015). We premiered this film at our own festival back in 2016, during the year’s CineMondays spring series. It was my first year at PJFM (then known as the Gershman Y), and I remember seeing bits and pieces from the film at the Lightbox Film Center, back when it was located at International House Philadelphia. It was definitely a unique movie for the organization to show, at least back then, mainly because it’s a horror movie. Watching it in one sitting six years later, I couldn’t be prouder that we debuted this movie, and it’s astounding to me how so few people – even the most die-hard indie horror fans – have probably seen it.
First of all, don’t let the poster for Demon mislead you. Yes, it’s a creepy image of a possessed man contorting his body with his mouth agape, similar to any film about demonic possession, but this isn’t your traditional horror movie. There’s no gore, apart from a couple nosebleeds. There aren’t any cheap jump-scares. Director Marcin Wrona, who tragically committed suicide the year of Demon’s release, relies more on mood and atmosphere to spur unease in the viewer. Demon is that type of psychological, arthouse horror movie where you just go, “what the HECK is going on?” throughout. This kind of sub-horror genre is my favorite because its films rely less on shock value and more on abstraction. As viewers, we carefully examine these movies frame by frame and decipher what it’s all about. We decipher…and the more we do, the more scary things become.
From beginning to end, Demon feels like a dreamlike, out-of-body experience that we shouldn’t be participating in. Based on a 2008 play by Piotr Rowicki (titled Clinging), the film opens on a gloomy day in a desolate, eerie town in Poland. A backhoe drives through the empty streets. A young man, Piotr (Itay Tiran, excellent), boards a ferry by himself and sees a distraught woman splashing about in the far distance of the lake. Is she drowning? Right away, Wrona has immersed us in his film. He juxtaposes two innocuous things, an image and some creepy music, and somehow it gets under our skin. When a horror movie can accomplish that in just the first five minutes, we know we’re in for something unnerving.
Piotr, as we soon find out, is from England and on his wedding to see his bride-to-be, Zaneta (Agnieszka Zulewska). Although it was a very quick engagement, the two seem to be in love, unable to keep their hands off one another. Even Zaneta’s father (Andrzej Grabowski), the intimidatingly rich patriarch of the family, seemingly approves of her daughter’s fiancé. The wedding is set to take place at this private, rural estate over the lake that used to belong to Zaneta’s grandfather. The evening before the wedding, Piotr uses the backhoe to dig a hole outside the venue and discovers human skeletal remains. Not willing to tell everyone and kill the mood (no pun intended) of the wedding, he covers the skeleton back with the dirt. That night, during a thunderstorm, he hears a noise from outside. He walks to where the skeleton was and sees a woman dressed in a wedding gown. Suddenly, he falls into a muddy hole of some sort. Actually, “falls” isn’t the right word. He is practically sucked into it like quicksand.
The next morning, Zaneta’s brother, ‘Jasny’ (Tomasz Schuchardt), arrives at the estate and finds his soon-to-be brother-in-law passed out in his car. Piotr seems…a little confused, but OK. What happened last night? Was it all just a dream? The wedding happens very fast, and it is a Christian wedding too, I should note. In fact, the only Jewish guest is a schoolteacher (Wlodzimierz Press), who soon plays a bigger part in the story. Everything is going fine, but Piotr’s mental health worsens. He feels jittery and nervous, and why does he keep having visions of the woman in white? Curious, he goes back to the hole where he found the skeleton, but there’s nothing in the ground. A little later, while dancing, he falls to the ground and has an epileptic seizure.
“Concerned” isn’t exactly the word to describe the guests after this incident. At first, Zaneta’s family blames her husband’s weird behavior on too much alcohol. (It is a wedding, after all.) After the seizure, instead of rushing him to the hospital, they just distribute more liquor to the guests so the party doesn’t end.
“He just had food poisoning,” one of them explains to the crowd. “But don’t worry! It was just food that he ate, not any of yours.”
There is an intentional indifference from these characters that Wrona makes very clear. When they lock Piotr in a cellar from having a second seizure on the dance floor, they still feel more annoyed than concerned for the groom’s health. The only individuals genuinely concerned are Zaneta and the schoolteacher. So what’s actually going on with Piotr? He’s possessed, of course! The schoolteacher believes Piotr is possessed by a dybbuk (“demon” in Jewish mythology), a spirit of a dead soul possessing a living one. This dybbuk plays a bigger part in the allegorical aspects of Demon’s story. I won’t say who is possessing Piotr, but it does relate to…yes, you guessed it: the Holocaust.
I think it’s accurate to say that Demon requires multiple viewings. It’s an ambiguous, poetic horror film that really taps into our psyche. Ambiguous, indeed, is Piotr himself. Who is this guy? Where is his family and why are they never mentioned? Are they even at the wedding? There is a final shot in the movie that delves a little further into this enigma, as well as his connection to Poland’s past.
In addition, Demon presents itself as less of a psychological, “scary” movie and more of an absurdist satire on Poland’s modern-day relationship with pre- and post-WWII. As I mentioned before, it’s obvious that there are very few sympathetic characters in Demon. Wrona intentionally makes every party guest a wild, drunken animal, completely oblivious to the chaos happening right in front of their eyes. The entire estate could collapse, and they would still drink and dance. The more we learn about Zaneta’s family, the more this behavior manifests as a metaphor for the aloofness many non-Jewish Poles feel about the Holocaust. Last year, we premiered a documentary all about this, titled Muranow (2021), a film about modern-day Poles and their attitude towards Jews and the Shoah. (I highly recommend it!)
The imagery in Demon is not so much disturbing as unsettling and haunting. We feel the rain and mud, the loud wedding music and the shouting from the intoxicated guests. We hear the cries of anguish Piotr yells in Yiddish as his possession goes on. Even when he gets a bloody nose, he and Zaneta make love, and his blood smears over her face. We are unsettled by this moment, yet we can’t look away. At PJFM, we were fortunate enough to bring the cinematographer of the film, Pawel Flis, to our screening in 2016. He has a natural ability to lure us in with his camera, and there are many shots in Demon that will forever stay lodged in my head.
There are unanswered questions in Demon that may frustrate viewers, but the more you analyze the film, the greater you appreciate its ingenious writing. To make a movie that is both creepy and deeply political is rare and requires delicate skill. Wrona (RIP) has achieved what more horror filmmakers should do: creep us out AND get in our heads.
Demon is now streaming on Roku, Tubi, and PLEX.