Short Film: The Strzygoń & How to Deal with Him (Poland, 2019 [?])

Recently, while distracting ourselves from work by doing that typically cis-gender male thing of perusing porn on the internet, in a moment of serendipity we stumbled upon the typically semi-dead tumblr site Nice Sausages — which, despite its name, doesn't do porn. No, it specializes in darkly arty images and GIFs (like the one below) and an occasional film by someone named Kajetan Obarski, who seems to live in the City of Eternal Spliffs, Amsterdam. And what do you know, he's a Pole — which makes this month's Short Film of the Month the third Polish film we've chosen this year. (And to think we here at a wasted life are all for Polexit... but then, we wouldn't be against the US being divided into four distinct countries, either.)

We say serendipity because earlier this month we learned, by way of the excellent feature film Strigio (2009), that the name for the Romanian variant of the vampire in strigio. The Polish name of pretty much the same kind of vampire reveals itself as somewhat similar: strzygoń. Obarski's animated short, The Strzygoń & How to Deal with Him, made as part of the Upiór Project, pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the mythological creature which, going by the description found at YouTube, definitely mirrors everything we learned about that variant of the undead in the movie Strigio.

As Obarski explains: "The strzygoń is a figure that appears often in Polish folk mythology and under many names: it can be a man with two souls who rises from the grave to scare and strangle the living, yet it can also be a caring — yet still dead — husband and father... There is only one way to free yourself from them forever. This animation explaining strzygoń behavior, including how to get rid of them, is based on 19th-century folk legends and made using resources from libraries and digital museums. [YouTube]"

The short is quirky and funny, intriguing and entertaining, and even educational – Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Strzygoń, you could say. Enjoy.

The Strzygoń & How to Deal with Him:

PS: If you liked the above, dare we suggest you give Obarski's Dead Liver a go?