Leptirica (1973)

Leptirica is a Serbian film that debuted on television in the early seventies, and it adapts a vampire story that is apparently quite famous in many parts of the world, but that I had never heard of before. The film's director, Djordje Kadijević, is a force to be reckoned with in his native region, as he released at least three similarly folky horror films in the same year, and this is the first of the bunch I'm to look at. Taking a dip in a foreign land of myth and legend can be a truly invigorating experience, but does Leptirica really stand out in a sea of vampire tales? Sure, the book this is based on was one of the first - it proceeded Dracula by two decades - but is it worth revisiting? Well, I'm not sure I can say for certain, but here's my take on this wonderful little slice of Serbian folklore: I thought this film was not great.

The concept of a vampire that blurs the line between bat, wolf, moth, and butterfly is kind of neat, and the twist of who the monster was all along was surprising enough, although I may just be a moron. But that's very little of the film, really. Most of the film follows a motley group of villagers as they embark upon whacky hijinks in an attempt to survive a little longer, stuck between being sucked dry by a vampire or starving to death. There are aspects that were alright, but everything kind of fell flat for me just the same. Attempts at humor and attempts at horror all blur together and trip over one another in a mystifying fashion. 

And that's when the film isn't simply being extremely grating on the senses and on one's patience. What are either the sounds of a monkey or a hooting own are used almost like a horror sting throughout, which gets very obnoxious very fast. And my god, the music: I like it in theory, as it consists of nothing but choral chanting in the raw, looped again and again... Only it loops during dialogue! The film comes off as extremely tossed together in moments like these. The cinematography is decent enough, and the film has a nice rural texture, but not enough to justify putting up with the rest of it. And that's before the story completely falls apart, with an ending that, while surprising, made no sense at all once examined closely (what did the coffin have to do with anything? I figured they were just barking up the wrong tree all along but then it ends up featuring prominently in the very end which totally lost me?) It's the kind of thing most people picture when 'foreign films' are brought up: something bewildering and culturally alien enough that it bounces right off a Westerner and leaves one in a state of total confusion for an hour. By the time it's over, you can see it for what it is, but it's still not really any good.

Overall, I wasn't impressed with this film. When I wrote about the previous film from All the Haunts Be Ours, I said that it felt academic in its treatment of folklore. This film, by contrast, feels academic in the sense that only academics will have any interest in watching it because it's slow, baffling, and often hastily constructed. Hopefully, Kadijević's other two horror films from 1973 are more interesting, but something tells me I'm not that lucky.