Andrzej Zulawski, a Polish director who blended surrealism, horror and psychic excess in the emotionally savage films “The Important Thing Is to Love,” “Possession” and “My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days,” died on Wednesday in Warsaw. He was 75.

The cause was cancer, a spokesman for the Polish Film Institute said.

Mr. Zulawski, known primarily to a small art-house and film festival audience, made no concessions to logic, ordinary human motivations or audience squeamishness in directing his overwrought films, for which French critics created the adjective Zulawskien, meaning over the top.

In “Possession” (1981), the only film by Mr. Zulawski to be released commercially in the United States, Isabelle Adjani played a woman who, as her marriage disintegrates, indulges in a mad affair with a squidlike creature that evolves into a simulacrum of her husband, played by Sam Neill. In one of the film’s most memorable moments, she throws herself against the walls of a metro underpass in West Berlin and convulses, with fluids oozing from every orifice.

The critic J. Hoberman, writing in The New York Times in 2012, described Mr. Zulawski as “an auteur to be approached with trepidation.” He added: “His movies are seldom more than a step from some flaming abyss, with his actors (and audience) trembling on the edge. Typically shot with a frenzied, often subjective moving camera in saturated colors that have the over-bright feel of a chemically induced hallucination, these can be hard to watch and harder to forget.”