Lokis. Rękopis profesora Wittembacha

• Adapted by Majewski from Prosper Mérimée's 1869 novella "Lokis. A Manuscript of Professor Wittembach" — the same source Walerian Borowczyk would loosely mine five years later for his bestiality-soaked scandal piece The Beast (1975), making it the rare horror story with two wildly opposite adaptations by Polish directors.
• The title is built on a mistake: "Lokis" is Mérimée's own misspelling of the Lithuanian word "lokys," meaning bear. The film keeps the error in its name.
• The score is by Wojciech Kilar — over two decades before his international breakout on Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) — working in Polish restraint rather than gothic bombast.
• Józef Duriasz plays Count Michał Szemiot and Edmund Fetting plays the pastor Wittembach, with Małgorzata Braunek as the doomed bride Julia Dowgiałło and Zofia Mrozowska as the count's haunted mother, Countess Szemiot. Stefan Matyjaszkiewicz shot it, giving the film a muted, burnished glow.
• It runs 100 minutes and opened in Poland on September 25, 1970. In 1971 Majewski took the ex-aequo Best Feature Film Director prize at the 14th Sitges science-fiction and horror festival in Spain.
• Critics have repeatedly flagged the film's defining trait: its deliberate restraint with the horror — the bride is found with her throat slashed only after the killing, never shown — which some praise as control and others fault as a horror movie with the horror left out.

The film withholds the bear on purpose. Szemiot is never shown transforming, and the only "monster" evidence is gossip, a dead bride, and a man who runs to the woods. Read straight, this is less a werebear picture than a study of inherited madness and aristocratic decay — the count poisoned by his mother's trauma and the family's rot, with the supernatural as the village's way of explaining a violent breakdown it can't otherwise name.

The wedding-night kill plays as the eruption of everything the pastor's pious, cataloguing gaze refuses to look at. The whole movie buries its eroticism under genteel manners and ecclesiastical study, then resolves it in one offscreen act of animal violence — the bestial standing in for a desire the count was never allowed to express any other way.

Set in Mérimée's contested Lithuania and made by Poles, the story can be read as a frontier nightmare: the refined outsider scholar arriving to 'study' a wild borderland, only to find the land's old, untamed nature reclaim its supposedly civilized heir. The bear isn't an aberration — it's what the place is, under the manners.

A buttoned-up Lutheran pastor rides into the autumn-into-winter wilds of 19th-century Lithuania, cataloguing folklore at the estate of a brooding young count. The locals whisper that the count's mother was dragged off by a bear and came back changed, and that what she bore was only partly a man. Majewski never confirms it outright. He lets the dread accumulate in cold corridors, hunting dogs that won't settle, and a bride whose wedding night ends with her throat torn open and her groom gone into the trees.