Abstract
This article reads Stefan Grabiński’s 1919 collection The Motion Demon as a media-theoretical intervention in horror. Treating the railway as autonomous infrastructure rather than a gothic setting, it analyses the tales through the lens of recursion – systems that loop, regulate and intensify beyond human intention. I situate Grabiński alongside media and horror theory to argue that his fiction anticipates contemporary concerns about automation and infrastructural opacity. Across nine stories, horror arises not from malfunction but from machinic systems that function too well, inscribing and modulating experience and sometimes erasing the subject. This feedback-driven mode shifts attention from supernatural breach to the eerie smoothness of operative continuity while offering a poetics of infrastructure that reveals the uncanny agency of modern systems. Positioned at the intersection of literary horror, media theory and infrastructure studies, the article reframes horror as a genre that diagnoses how media shape what can be sensed and known.