Published: July 06, 2015| 10:26 PM

On Monday, the Polish drama The Red Spider entered the Official Selection competition. It takes place in 1967 in Kraków, where a promising young athlete reveals the identity of a serial killer. This act fatefully changes his grey existence in an unhappy totalitarian state.

Marcin Koszałka, who has primarily worked until now as a cameraman and on auteurist documentaries, drew inspiration for his feature-length debut from the life of Polish rapist and murderer Karol Kot, who earned the nickname The Vampire of Kraków in the late 1960s. But Koszałka was not interested in simply depicting the historical reality. Kot led him to a film about how one finds evil in oneself, how enticing evil can be, how it can change us. In his words, Koszałka tried to capture the moment when we succumb to it for good. “Don’t expect a crime film like Silence of the Lambs or Fincher’s thrillers Seven and Zodiac. I don’t want to portray a serial killer as a deranged individual, my hero is an ordinary person living in the sad era of Communism,” he told the website OnetFilm.

Koszałka has come to Karlovy Vary several times before. In 2011, his Declaration of Immortality won the prize for the best documentary film up to 30 minutes in length.