SzamankaMovies like Szamanka
- Key Features:
- Anthropology, Shamanism, Obsession, Mummy, Forbidden knowledge, Supernatural, Cultural clash, Archaeological discovery, Spiritualism, Ritual, Possession, Psychological thriller, Erotic thriller, Mystery, Forbidden love, Academic setting
- Tone:
- serious, stylized, suspense-driven
- Target Audience:
- Fans of psychological thrillers, Viewers interested in anthropology, Fans of supernatural mysteries, Art house cinema enthusiasts
- Emotional Arc:
- Intrigue → Obsession → Dread
Szamanka

Anthropology professor Michal develops two overwhelming obsessions. The first one is a mummified, 3,000 year-old, perfectly preserved body of a shaman he and his colleagues have recently dragged out of a swamp. The second is an enigmatic student he meets by chance at a railway station.
Szamanka
A bridegroom is possessed by an unquiet spirit in the midst of his own wedding celebration, in this clever take on the Jewish legend of the dybbuk.

While doing a thesis about violence, Ángela finds a snuff video where a girl is tortured to death. Soon she discovers that the girl was a former student at her college...

Pernat finds himself in a police interrogation, accused of a murder, and unable to recall any details of the crime, or even his own life. He's released back into a world of raving lunatics and deranged dentists, murderous doctors and scientists who believe the secret of human creation is inside the walls of a cast-iron oven.

Unable to process the death of his daughter, Detective Boyd embarks on a hunt for a serial killer who murders according to a brutal tribal ritual: Muti. The only person who can help Boyd is Professor Mackles, an anthropologist who hides an unspeakable secret. The line between sanity and madness thins as Boyd goes deeper into the killer’s world.

A man and a woman meet in the ruins of post-war Poland. With vastly different backgrounds and temperaments, they are fatally mismatched and yet drawn to each other.

An Italian high school student becomes infatuated with a woman he sees outside his class window. Her fiancée is in jail for being involved in a radical movement, and she spends much time in court providing moral support. At first she resists the student's advances, but eventually begins an affair with him. Their situation is condemned by her family and his father, who is the woman's psychologist.

A university professor, who wants to slow down a little, moves with his wife and daughter, from the big city to a small town and starts a new job as a teacher in a girls' gymnasium. Something weird is happening with the class, they seem to hide a secret. As it turns out, these girls don't play with dolls...

Monika lives with Rob, a corpse she loves. Her dilemma intensifies when she meets Mark and considers a normal life with him. She must choose between her affection for Rob and a new relationship.

In a monastery cut off from the world, the monks run a clinic for the possessed. One day, a young policeman Marek comes to the convent. Posing as a clergyman, he penetrates monastic life and tries to explain the recent, mysterious disappearance of several tormented inmates. It turns out, however, that there is no way out of the monastery.

Medical student Paula wins a place at an exclusive Heidelberg medical school. When the body of a young man she met on the train turns up on her dissection table, she begins to investigate the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death.

The mummy of a cursed pharaoh and a reanimated corpse terrorize a medical university. Only an Egyptologist and a college professor, the deranged Dr. Frankenstein, may be able to stop the creatures before it's too late.

Grotesquely surreal offering charting three male generations of the same bizarre family, including a pervert who constantly seeks for new kinds of satisfaction, an obese speed eater, and a passionate embalmer.

In Germany, as graduate student Katie Armstrong researches cannibal killer Oliver Hagen for her thesis, she becomes obsessed with her subject and ultimately plunges into a lifestyle similar to Hagen's and the thousands of people like him.

A father and daughter, Michał and Anka, have a unique intimacy, which the college-aged Anka is beginning to feel conflicted about. When she finds an unopened letter from her deceased mother, it seems to justify her attraction to Michał, who may not in fact be her father.

Sebastiano teaches high school gym classes and coaches swimming. He’s got a job, a girlfriend, and a pretty normal life. But as young Martin starts to infiltrate Sebastiano’s life, his world will get turned upside down. Eerie from the first frame, this Hitchcockian thriller portrays sexual obsession with terrifying realism.

A college paleontology professor acquires a newly discovered specimen of a coelacanth, but while examining it, he is accidentally exposed to its blood, and finds himself periodically turning into a murderous Neanderthal man.

On a college trip to remote Northern forests, one of the students - Marina - encounters a burial site of an ancient witch, and is possessed by the spirits of the past. Now Marina and her companions must take part in the millennia old fight between good and evil, involving lake witches, sorcerers, and ancient forces from the myths.

An anthropology professor and his students attempt to track down a Bigfoot responsible for a rash of violent murders, only to uncover something even more sinister.

Peppino, a diminutive taxidermist with a reputation for sleaziness, meets Valerio, a handsome if artless much younger man fascinated by the trade. Peppino offers him a large salary to come work as his assistant, with the job burgeoning into a budding friendship he mistakes for something more. When Valerio finds a girlfriend, their fledgling romance will be threatened by an insanely jealous third wheel.

After tracing the origin of a disturbing supernatural affliction to a wealthy family's ancestral gravesite, a team of paranormal experts relocates the remains—and soon discovers what happens to those who dare to mess with the wrong grave.

A newly appointed teacher finds herself being followed, and soon discovers that one of her own students is obsessed with her.

The film tells about mainly three people - Max, a bored, smart, poor University Professor of Philosophy; Ramzes, a mafia leader, cool, strong, merciless bully and Stella, Ramzes girlfriend.

A shy French anthropologist who happens to be secretly in love with her college superior, chooses "bimbos" as the subject of her thesis. She becomes one of them in order to do that, and the professor she loves falls for her new identity.

Academic researchers are chased by a nuclear-hot specimen of ancient Mayan blob.

Successful writer and scholar Jonathan Merrick falls under the spell of the irresistible, bewitchingly beautiful Ligeia. She's fighting a fatal illness and she will stop at nothing to defeat death, her one true enemy.

A young policewoman slowly goes insane while tracking down an elusive serial rapist/killer through Italy when she herself becomes a victim of the brutal man's obsession.

Alex and Selma are a couple in love on a trip to the heart of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Suddenly, Selma feels a mysterious force is chasing them.

A busy attorney, worried that his anorexic daughter Olga, who is still grieving her recently deceased mother, might try to harm herself, sends her to see a psychiatrist who's dealing with her own loss in an unusual way.

When an infamous "cursed" Egyptian sarcophagus falls into the hands of unscrupulous huckster Everett Randolph, he becomes obsessed with resurrecting the mummified princess held within it.

A young woman left her family for an unspecified reason. The husband determines to find out the truth and starts following his wife. At first, he suspects that a man is involved. But gradually, he finds out more and more strange behaviors and bizarre incidents that indicate something more than a possessed love affair.

When Dr. Pieter Fales' patients start receiving ominous letters and getting murdered by an unknown black-clad assailant, he and his daughter both come under suspicion.

Professor Malcolm Evans leads his archaeological expedition into the Valley of Temples in southeast Sicily. His companion and former student, Liza Harris, is looking forward to her very first dig. But Liza feels a strange sympathy with the valley and her recurring nightmares seem strongly tied to the nearby ruins. She is drawn to the remains of a 16th Century convent and its grisly legend of crucifixion. The local villagers rise to protect the entombed secrets of their ancestors, as Liza's obsession with uncovering the truth takes her deeper into the forbidden ruins and further from sanity!

An archaeology student photographs a mysterious naked woman by a waterfall, unaware that she is a female demon called Haggia, who soon takes possession of him via a cursed amulet.

An erotic island retreat plays host to an exclusive couple’s retreat designed to rekindle the flames of passion. When Stacy and her boyfriend arrive, the sexy fun is quickly interrupted by a malevolent entity that feeds on their pain.

A New York University professor returns from a rescue mission to the Amazon rainforest with the footage shot by a lost team of documentarians who were making a film about the area's local cannibal tribes.

An Oxford Medical School graduate takes a position at a mental institution and soon becomes obsessed with a female mental patient, but he has no idea of a recent and horrifying staffing change.

A pregnant woman, who is taking care of her son with development problems, is at her breaking point when a caregiver from the Philippines steps into her life. Diana suspects that she’s using voodoo against her after the quick improvements of her son.

In a Naples suspended between magic and superstition, madness and rationality, a mystery envelops the existence of Adriana, overwhelmed by a sudden love and a violent crime.

Professor Philip Goodman devotes his life to exposing phony psychics and fraudulent supernatural shenanigans. His skepticism soon gets put to the test when he receives news of three chilling and inexplicable cases -- disturbing visions in an abandoned asylum, a car accident deep in the woods and the spirit of an unborn child. Even scarier -- each of the macabre stories seems to have a sinister connection to the professor's own life.

Six outwardly average individuals have elaborate fetishes they indulge with surreptitious care. A mousy letter carrier makes dough balls she grotesquely ingests before bed. A shop clerk fixates on a TV news reader while he builds a machine to massage and masturbate him. One of his customers makes an elaborate chicken costume for a voodoo-like scene with a doll resembling his plump neighbor. She, in turn, has a doll that resembles him, which she whips and dominates in an abandoned church. The TV news reader has her own fantasy involving carp. Her husband, who is indifferent to her, steals materials to fashion elaborate artifacts that he rubs, scrapes and rolls across his body.

A group of college friends reunite for a trip to the forest, but encounter a menacing presence in the woods that's stalking them.

A young man awakens in the hospital after an accident wipes his memory. Fascinated by a textbook full of drawings of dissections, Hiroshi is drawn to medical school. There he catches the eye of a fellow student, but it's another who becomes his obsession: the dead woman on the cadaver table.

A story about Janina Duszejko, an elderly woman, who lives alone in the Klodzko Valley where a series of mysterious crimes are committed. Duszejko is convinced that she knows who (or what) is the murderer, but nobody believes her.

A group of friends discover an ancient book, the Necronomicon, the Book of the Deads. They discover that the book is a link between our world and the world of ancients creatures, older than our civilizations.

Deep in a secluded forest, Marko lives in isolation under the watchful eye of his overprotective father, who is determined to keep his young son safe from the Evil Ones. Deeply lonely, and increasingly curious about the outside world, Marko yearns to uncover the secrets of life beyond the forest and begins venturing further from home. But after a cruel turn of events grants his wish sooner than he ever imagined, Marko is forced to flee and embark on a grim journey filled with unknown dangers and a glimpse into a world forever changed.

A college student starts to experience extreme seizures. She soon learns that the violent episodes are a symptom of inexplicable abilities.

The spirit of an ancient evil queen posesses the body of a young anthropological student, who then goes on a murderous rampage.

A team of Arctic researchers find a 40,000 year-old man frozen in ice and bring him back to life. Anthropologist Dr. Stanley Shephard wants to befriend the Iceman and learn about the man's past while Dr. Diane Brady and her surgical team want to discover the secret that will allow man to live in a frozen state.

After having narrowly escaped an attempt on his life at the hands of a psychopath, detective inspector Takakura quits active service in the police force and takes up a position as a university lecturer in criminal psychology. But his desire to get to the bottom of criminals’ motives remains, and he does not hesitate long when former colleague Nogami asks him to reopen an old case.

A single mother and a childless morgue technician are bound together by their relationship to a little girl they have reanimated from the dead.

A group of archaeologists uncover a strange structure in Northern Canada, dating over ten thousand years before the present. The team finds themselves isolated when their communication systems fail and it's not long before they begin to feel the effects of the solitude.

The inhabitants of a small Japanese town become increasingly obsessed with and tormented by spirals.

A newly-married woman becomes frustrated as her husband, a reindeer herder for an Arctic village, spends much of his time away. Desperate for affection, she visits a shaman who offers a potion that makes her irresistibly desirable, with unexpected and deadly results.

Anja and five friends join anthroplogy student, Dace, on a journey to study a remote, ancient rock painting. Their excitement vanishes when Mel becomes delirious after skinny-dipping in the waterhole. Feverish, bleeding, confused, she physically and mentally regresses to a vicious predatory state. Mel has gone primal. Mel’s lover and friends realise they are the prey as she savagely hunts them down. Before they can escape another one of them starts to regress, posing a hideous choice; kill their friends or be killed by them. Their only hope of survival is through a cave, where Anja learns too late the meaning of the ancient rock art they came to study.

Stephen is a professor at Oxford University who is caught in a rut and feels trapped by his life in both academia and marriage. One of his students, William, is engaged to the beautiful Anna, and Stephen becomes enamored of the younger woman. These three people become linked together by a horrible car crash, with flashbacks providing details into the lives of each person and their connection to the others in this brooding English drama.

When a childless couple learn that they cannot have children, it causes great distress. To ease his wife's pain, the man finds a piece of root in the backyard and chops it and varnishes it into the shape of a child. However the woman takes the root as her baby and starts to pretend that it is real.

Every day at 6 pm a serial killer kills another person. Police officer Helena Rus thinks the killings are done by one man only and decides to reveal the killer's identity by getting back in 18th century history of the city.

Two scientists are chosen as guinea pigs for a time experiment: they are placed in hibernation and should be brought back to life after three years. In the meantime, however, World War III breaks out and life has been wiped off the surface of Earth. When they wake up, it turns out that not only 50 years have passed but also that they are the only living specimens of the male sex in a new, underground society composed exclusively of women.

A professor and four graduate students journey to a crumbling mansion to investigate paranormal activity and must battle ghosts, aliens and satanic entities.

When her mother is killed in a mysterious house fire, rebellious teen Debbie Strand is sent to live with her grandmother, where she becomes even more unhinged. She develops an intense crush on her hunky creative writing teacher, Peter Rinaldi, but her numerous attempts at seduction end in failure. Soon Peter's friends start turning up dead, and he fears that his fiancée, Marilyn, may be Debbie's next victim.

College student Ben inherits a curious old mechanical box that churns out voodoo dolls. When a shadowy figure starts using the box to murder Ben's friends, he must find the killer.

Filip buys an 8mm movie camera when his first child is born. Because it's the first camera in town, he's named official photographer by the local Party boss. His horizons widen when he is sent to regional film festivals with his first works but his focus on movie making also leads to domestic strife and philosophical dilemmas.

Ana is confronted with body and desire at three key moments of her life. As a young girl, she brings her dead grandpa back to life. In her puberty, she discovers the power of decay and sexuality. Finally, she wrestles with loss and loneliness when she returns to her parental home, now derelict.

After fun-loving metalhead Jacek is disfigured in an accident at work, he becomes the first person in Poland to receive a face transplant. This leads to his status as a media spectacle and martyr, all while battling ensuing identity issues as a consequence.

An archaeological team attempt to unlock the secrets of a lost pyramid only to find themselves hunted by an insidious creature.

A Spanish orchestra conductor deals with the mysterious disappearance of his girlfriend.

Driven by biological excess, a young man and woman search for sexual fulfillment, unaware of each other's existence. Unfortunately, they eventually meet, and the bonding of these two very unusual human beings ends in an explosive and ultimately over-the-top sexual experience, resulting in a truly god awful love story....

A young woman struggling with addiction comes into possession of an ancient puzzle box, unaware that its purpose is to summon the Cenobites, a group of sadistic supernatural beings from another dimension.

Criminal psychologist Kate Fuller is assigned to the murder of a man who has seemingly been strangled in his sleep by his wife and the only witness is their eight-year-old daughter, Sophie. As Kate digs into the mystery of an ancient demon which kills people in their sleep, she experiences the same petrifying symptoms as all previous victims and spirals through a chilling nightmare to save herself and Sophie before she dares fall asleep again.

A psychotic killer is on the prowl, who continues to slaughter young women while an innocent man is wrongly accused and sentenced for crimes he could never have committed. A determined detective arrives on the scene and soon becomes obsessed with the case while under pressure from the prosecutor to see a man hang.

A nerdy film student and lifelong voyeur begins to believe that two lovely young strangers may have conspired to commit a brutal murder.

A passionate telling of the story of Sada Abe, a woman whose affair with her master led to an obsessive and ultimately destructive sexual relationship.

Two introverted people find out by pure chance that they share the same dream every night. They are puzzled, incredulous, a bit frightened. As they hesitantly accept this strange coincidence, they try to recreate in broad daylight what happens in their dream.

Michalina Wislocka, the most famous and recognized sexologist of communist Poland, fights for the right to publish her book, which will change the sex life of Polish people forever.

Roman and Hanka have a loving marriage, but his impotence has led to her having an affair. The unbearable situation drives Roman to extreme measures both physically and mentally, testing their love and his own will to live.

Betriek lives at the edge of a peat bog in the North of the Netherlands. When she and her family are attacked by a random stranger one night, Betriek sets out to find an explanation. The more she digs, the more she becomes convinced that she is being hunted by something ancient.

Olga and Maks are 15 years away. She is a successful woman with an established position, the mother of an adult daughter, he is a handsome young man who enjoys his life in a handful and lives only in the moment. It might seem that these two different worlds will never meet, and yet fate put them in the way.

Louise and Kasper want to become parents, but Louise cannot have children. She seals a pact with her Romanian maid, Elena, to bear her child, but things don't turn out quite as planned...

David, a college student, is looking for a job. He is hired by Dr. Stoner as a lab assistant for his research and experiments on snakes. David also begins to fall for Stoner's young daughter, Kristina. However, the good doctor has secretly brewed up a serum that can transform any man into a King Cobra snake-and he plans to use it on David.

In an incendiary story of love, desire, and betrayal between siblings, the rebellious young Tadek returns to his half-sister Anka’s home in search of solace and affection. Bound together by a painful shared family history, brother and sister must find a way to break free in order to survive. This formidable debut fearlessly yet tenderly explores one of society’s last taboos.

Zofia, a professor of ethics, is visited by Elżbieta, an American researching the fate of Jews who survived World War II. A daytime classroom conversation turns into a night of confrontation, and Zofia is forced to answer for a decision she made decades ago that directly affected the course of Elżbieta’s life.

A teenage postal worker, Tomek, routinely spies on his older neighbor Magda, a sexually liberated artist who lives in the apartment across the courtyard from his. As their private worlds merge, fascination turns to obsession, and the line between love and curiosity becomes violently blurred.

A student moves in with a family that lives in an underground house in the middle of the forest, far from civilization. His hopes of peace and quiet are soon shattered, when it becomes apparent that both the parents and their son have a screw loose.

Relations between the students and the new teacher of German are extremely tense. When one female student commits suicide, her schoolmates blame the teacher for her death. An awareness that things are not quite so black and white comes too late.

After one thousand years, three vixens transform into humans. They seduce a poor young scholar who soon finds himself in a horrifying situation.

Michel, a murderous womanizer, meets introverted Gloria online and treats her to a whirlwind one-night-stand. Offering herself as an accomplice in his seductive crimes, the unhinged lovers embark on a deadly odyssey amplified by wild sex, unbridled jealousy, and passionate forays into the dark arts. This smart and gory shocker breathes new life into the lovesick horror genre to serve up a chilling tale of white-hot desperation and terrifying devotion.

Samuel Salomon, a literature professor, has been off work for almost a year after the tragic death of his girlfriend. Samuel has been suffering from a recurring nightmare in which a woman is brutally murdered in a strange ritual. Suddenly, the same woman who appears every night in his dreams is found dead in exactly the same circumstances. Samuel sneaks into the crime scene and there he meets Rachel who has also dreamed about the murder. Together, they will do whatever they can to discover the identity of the mystery woman, entering a terrifying world controlled by the figures who have inspired artists throughout time: the Muses.

Adnan and Hicran are happily married however when their son die as a result of a mysterious accident Adanan becomes distant from his wife. Hicran starts investigating her past to see how it could connect to the death of her son.

Psychiatrist Caruso is arguably as nutty as his patients. He can remember at two years old being completely besotted by the charms of a naked girl. Even today, he can think of little else besides sex, sex, sex.

Anita, a young woman with a troubled childhood and a hunger for love, finds a soul mate in Erik, a kindly college student.

A young man falls in love with a beautiful woman being chased by sinister masked figures at night. He tries to track her down, and learns she's being held captive by his father and colleagues who believe she's a vampire.

In the depths of an ancient forest, something has been growing. Something older than humanity itself, and perhaps greater too. When a park ranger discovers a man and his son living wild, she stumbles onto a secret that is about to change the world.

An unsettling feeling overwhelms a small Hungarian town when two orthodox Jews arrive with a mysterious trunk. As residents begin to speculate on the purpose of the visit of these two strangers, order starts to crumble in town with some pursuing devious plans and others finding remorse in their hearts.

In the 1970s, a British sound technician is brought to Italy to work on the sound effects for a gruesome horror film. His nightmarish task slowly takes over his psyche, driving him to confront his own past.

In an early 20th century village, a painter with an unusual commission finds two pretty girls two model for him. The girls slowly come of age while exploring their sexuality and finding liberation in a repressed society.

A conflicted youth confesses to crimes he didn't commit while a man and woman aroused by death become obsessed with each other.

Archaeologists discover the final resting place of a boy king, removing the remains to be exhibited in a museum. By disturbing the sarcophagus they unleash the forces of darkness. The Mummy has returned to discharge a violent retribution on the defilers as the curse that surrounds the tomb begins to come true. One by one the explorers are murdered until one of them discovers the ancient words that have the power to reduce the brutal killer to particles of dust.


