Original title: Anna i wampir
In the late 1960s, the Polish police force in Dabrowa Basin, a mining-oriented region, was still struggling to catch an infamous serial killer named "The Basin Vampire" by the media. So far, he attacked more than a dozen women, hit them on the head using some sort of blunt instrument and then assaulted and / or robbed them. Some of the attacked died, those who survived the assaults were unable to provide many details of the culprit. Due to the nature of the attacks, often taking place near train stations and in poor visibility, the police are also struggling to find any witnesses or to narrow down the area. The nature of the Dabrowa Basin also does not help - there are densely populated cities close to each other and linked with many railroad connections, so the investigating team faces a huge challenge. Captain Jaksa, in charge of the investigation, thinks it would be best to seek some outside help that would help them eliminate at least some of over 100,000 suspects they have in the area, but the political pressure from the communist party to solve the case quickly and quietly causes Jaksa to be pushed aside and Major Dobija from Warsaw arrives to take over, which causes some additional tensions. While they try several different approaches, from trying to lure the killer using female police officers seemingly walking alone in city parks to the introduction of an early computing technology to sift through the thousands of suspects data, but still end up with nothing.
The film is an unusual mixture of document-like materials from the original police investigation and fictionalized parts that fill the narrative flow. The effect is surprisingly good for the era it was made - Anna and the Vampire was made soon before communism had fallen in Poland, which was a turbulent time in Polish cinematography: the budgets were tiny, the equipment was outdated and the censorship was still very much in place. Yet, here we have a film that was somewhere between a true-crime documentary and a pretty tense crime movie.
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The killer
Zdzislaw Marchwicki, who was arrested in 1972, two years after the last Basin Vampire attack, was convicted and executed in 1977. There are some doubts if he really was the killer, one of the theories assumes that he was just a scapegoat used by the police to satisfy the communist party need to save face and bring a closure to the case that was embarrassing the police force and the communist government.
The title
The film title relates to the code name given to the case (Anna), after the first known victim of this serial killer. The term vampire was often used in the Polish media in reference to a serial killer with the addition of a place he operated in. This killer was called the Basin Vampire (Wampir z Zaglebia) from Dabrowa Basin, also there were f.e. Joachim Knychala called the Vampire of Bytom (from the city of Bytom), Stanislaw Modzelewski called the Vampire of Galkowek, Karol Kot called the Vampire of Krakow, etc.
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