This article addresses the adaptation of the 1869 French novella ‘Lokis’, by Prosper Mérimée, as a feature-length film in Poland in 1970 by Janusz Majewski, from a postcolonial and cognitive cultural perspective. The production marked the story’s hundredth anniversary, but also fell within the so-called ‘Small Stabilization’ under the authoritarian Gomułka regime. A foreign literary adaptation was ‘safe’ material for coded messages, as is typical of Socialist-era Polish cinema as well as of the Gothic. The figure of the werebear can be a foil for discussing defective masculine heroism in a familiar Polish nationalist mode, but also for recuperating a changing concept of Lithuania, where the story is set, as adapted from the pro-Polish, French-origin source material in a self-orientalizing process. This adaptation thus bespeaks a hidden and specifically cultural imperialism. Struggles over the origins, membership, and ownership of Polish culture are visible through certain innovations in Majewski’s work, including both new literary inclusions and the film’s English subtitling. While the film as received in Polish is not an unalloyed national self-projection, on Poland’s part, as a nuance-free historical subject, its packaging for global Anglophone audiences at least tries to suggest otherwise.