Last week a new series debuted on Netflix about a young medical student named Alex Walas (Barbara Liberek) who discovers her nightmares and disturbing thoughts might not be psychosis. She may be seeing the dead walking among the living and creepy apparitions simply because they are real. Vampires don't show up in mirrors or in cellphone photos, but these demons and deities do.
With a setup like that, it's tempting to think the series could be set anywhere, but according to series co-creator and co-director Kasia Adamik, there's a reason that the new eight-part fantasy-horror show "Cracow Monsters" (aka "Krakowskie potwory") is set in Poland's former capital.
In a Facetime conversation from France, Adamik, who hails from Warsaw (the current capital), explains, "It has thousands of years of history. With the buildings, it's a very beautiful, medieval city. It has one of the biggest (park) squares in the world. It has all these churches. It has a big Jewish neighborhood. When people come from Israel to visit Auschwitz, they stay in Cracow because it's not far away.
"You have the ghosts from way back from the Middle Ages, and then you have the very recent ghosts from World War II. All those churches are built on ancient ruins. There's a cave where there was supposed to be a dragon, but in the 16th century, it was a weird bordello or something."
The ancient proto-Slavic deities and demons make "Cracow Monsters" unique because the series has an attitude about sex and drugs that would seem out of place in Stateside horror entries.
In Wes Craven's "Scream," Jamie Kennedy declares, "I never thought I'd be so happy to be a virgin!" because his abstinence saves him from certain death. The divine forces in "Cracow Monsters" and carnality work differently.
"Pagan mythology is completely different from Christian, Catholic beliefs. Pagan people didn't have that taboo about sex. There was sex and ... death and gods. Everything was part of everyday life. It was very close to nature. Sex is part of life. It's Catholicism that made it a taboo," Adamik says.
'WATER WAS DEATH'
"We also wanted to reverse the meanings. In the Scandinavian or Greek mythology, fire is good. Zeus had the thunderbolt. You could cook. You could warm yourself. You could chase away beasts. Water was death. You could drown in the swamps, and the river would take away your animals and children."
In addition, there is another advantage to using Slavic mythology instead of more familiar spiritual tropes.
"The Slavic universe is not as well know, even in Poland. People know more about the Greek mythology or the Scandinavian mythology than they know about their own mythology. There were not a lot of documents to analyze. There were no recordings or books. People only started to study mythology scientifically in the 19th century."
Adamik readily acknowledges the influence of North American filmmakers on her own work. She jokes that one of the vans that her college-age paranormal investigators travel in could be from "Scooby Doo" (she loved the series as a child) and that the ability to see through the palms of one's hands owes a debt to Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth."
She's quick to add, "But, of course, del Toro also stole it. It's this old gypsy thing where you have tattoos that predicted your future. In the 18th and 19th century, we saw drawings and references of that stuff. We have references to things that might sound a little familiar. We tried to take that familiarity into our Slavic universe."
Like a lot of American series, her crew of college-age paranormal investigators includes older Professor Jan Zawadzki (Andrzej Chyra). It's tempting to compare him to the wise Rupert Giles from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," but the educator has personal conflicts that make him less trustworthy than his British-born counterpart. In addition, Alex worries that she may have inherited her mother's schizophrenia.
'AN ABSENT MOTHER'
"You have an absent mother for the main character. She struggles with abandonment and with guilt for maybe being the reason her mother is dead. On the other side, you have the father-son relationship with Zawadzki, who has a sick son and with Lucky Szczesny [Stanislaw Linowski], whom he would love to have as a son. He has to choose between one or the other at one point. We tried to make the characters struggle with parenthood," the director says.
She and her collaborators also tried to be judicious with how they used computer effects and makeup. While the series features lots of dramatic camera work and some impressively ghoulish creatures, Adamik says, "Hollywood has lots of CGI monsters, and we wanted to have some. We wanted to make the monsters and the demigods very realistic. I think 'analog' is the right word for it. We wanted to imagine them living amongst the people. If they came back, they could be in the field talking to you. They're not like magical beings. We wanted to make them like vegetables. We wanted to make it more down to earth."
In addition to what she has seen as a child growing up in Poland and France, Adamik comes from a family of filmmakers and artists. Her mother, Agnieszka Holland ("Europa Europa," "House of Cards"), and her aunt, Magdalena Lazarkiewicz are both film and TV writer-directors, and her father, Laco Adamik, has directed theater and operas.
ADAMIK SHARES CREDIT
Adamik shares credit for creating and directing "Cracow Monsters" with Olga Chajdas, who was romantically involved with her and continues to team up with her on films and TV projects. The two joined Holland in directing the 2018 Netflix series "1983" (the first Polish-language series for the streaming service) and have helmed the Amazon series "Absentia" and the HBO drama "The Border."
Adamik directed episodes one, six, seven and eight, while Chajadas supervised the rest. Both had to contend with the challenges of covid-19, which slowed down the shoot.
"We developed it together [with writers Magdalena Lankosz, Joanna Pawluskiewicz, Gaja Grzegorzewska and Anna Sienska]. Olga had some good ideas about the hospital [scenes] and the fights. We did the casting together," Adamik says. "We know each other well when it comes to work. Because it was originally my idea, so I wanted to direct the first episode, but then I wanted to do the finale and episode six with the travel to the Underworld."
"She's really my best friend. It was hard for a while. I can't imagine not talking with her and working with her."
Adamik's filmmaking started by working as a storyboard artist. She helped other directors like her mother by drawing how individual shots could be created and cut together to save time and money. She directed second unit sequences (where the lead actors don't appear) for Holland's films and eventually sat in the chair herself for her 2002 debut "Bark!," which starred screenwriter Heather Morgan and Lisa Kudrow.
SHE LEARNED A LOT
She obviously learned a lot from some formidable talents and from her three-time Academy Award-nominated mother. I should disclose that Holland, Adamik and I are friends.
Adamik says, "I worked with some amazing directors like Jonathan Demme ['Beloved'] and Luis Mandoki. I did a commercial with Kathryn Bigelow at one point. It was short work, but it was great.
"I also worked with a lot of not great directors. When you do storyboards you don't know what the story is going to be like. You take the job, and you do the work. In a funny way, it was amazing to work with the good ones, but working with the bad ones that made me want to become one. I felt I knew more about making movies than they do. They'd get these good ideas that they'd screw up."