Yugoslav Horror Cinema

While international horror spawned a range of subgenres, styles, and B movies, Yugoslav horror remained at heart existential, addressing fear that comes from within. The question of what it means to be human, and the slippery slope into the realm of the nonhuman, were explored through the image of the animal, or rather, the change that takes place when human beings begin to subtly take on traits of animality. In this essay, I compare Đorđe Kadijević’s rural folktale Лептирица (The She-Butterfly, 1973) and Krsto Papić’s urban nightmare Izbavitelj (The Rat Savior, 1976). While Kadijević’s film sees the myth of the vampire taken to a Serbian village, in which a young maiden becomes a murderous beast, Papić’s work takes us into the chiaroscuro underworld of Zagreb, where a poor writer begins to discover the city’s inhabitants seemingly transformed into rats. I aim to show the nuanced ways in which the films portray a common existential fear of the human-as-animal, and how they differ in their aesthetic representations of the human and nonhuman, violence and embodiment, folklore and civil society, in distinctive cultural locales.It is worth contextualizing relevant etymologies related to the human-as-animal and the development of the horror film in this specific historical and cultural context. The word vampire, which became an international phenomenon, comes from the Serbian language (vampir) and originated in the eighteenth century, when Austrian officials, at the time of the Habsburg Empire, came to Serbian villages following “claims of paranormal activities by deceased inhabitants.”1 While Christianity formed the cornerstone for Serbian civilization, words, names, and phrases that point to Old Slavic mythology survived, and, in some cases, polytheistic and superstitious beliefs characteristic to paganism manifested themselves in specific time periods and/or geocultural locales.2 Serbian vampires were also called werewolves and had “more in common with Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla than Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” rising from the dead after forty days to torment and drink the blood of their victims.3 By comparison, witches “could transform themselves into butterflies,” or into supernatural creatures, such as fairies.4 Key elements that characterized creatures in Old Slavic mythology and national folklore often crossed the lines between humans and animals and between the ugly and the beautiful, as in the former case of the vampire and werewolf, on the one hand, and the witch and the butterfly on the other. Kadijević’s The She-Butterfly draws on this regional symbolism. By comparison, the image of the black rat as a migratory creature that spreads disease and death is related to the history of the plague in Europe, and in particular the sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century epidemics in the Habsburg Empire, which subsequently imposed military-led “sanitary cordons” along its borders with the territories of Slavonia, Croatia, and Transylvania.5 Folktales emerged about the plague across Europe. In Croatia, the plague was described as a person(ality) living in the woods, eating human flesh and ready to sow death among the inhabitants of neighboring villages.6 The tension between human and animal, and the gradual yet violent personification of plague, transferred into the realm of urban society through the subject of Papić’s The Rat Savior.When it comes to the development of the horror film in Yugoslavia, the genre was a late bloomer. It traces its origins to the tradition of “film fantastique”—which in this context emerged from “national, folkloric and oral heritage,” is “characterized by phantasmagorical elements,” and as a supracategory would go on to include science fiction, horror, superhero fiction, supernatural, utopian/dystopian, apocalyptic/postapocalyptic, epic, and classical fantasy—that was established in 1924 by early film pioneer Ernest Bošnjak.7 Bošnjak’s work became central to the development of film language in Serbian cinema and infamous for his efforts to create a new Hollywood in Sombor.8 He began to exhibit films as early as 1906, and in 1909 he purchased a camera and shot Serbia’s first scripted film, U državi Terpsichore (The Dance of Terpsichore).9 As film historian Stevan Jovičić writes, Bošnjak “entered the annals of film history” with Otkrivanje spomenika Ferencu Rakociju (The Unveiling of the Francis Rakoczi Monument in Sombor, 1912) by “employing a camera attached to a tripod with a movable base” and thus capturing motion in a completely novel way, “both horizontally and vertically.”10 However, as Jovan Ristić and Dragan Jovićević remind us, it was Bošnjak’s Faun (1924) that became the “first Yugoslav fantastique film” by thematizing “the dance of fairies around Faun, a forest deity from Roman mythology.”11 Building on Terpsichore and Bošnjak’s unique approach to film language, with particular reference to innovation in cinematography, Faun is a work characterized not by “exotic worlds” but rather by what archivist Borislav Stanojević identifies as a “down-to-earth approach.”12 Though Faun is today considered lost, and exists only in one preserved frame, it remains a rare achievement of its kind.13 Meanwhile, Oktavijan Miletić, one of the major Croatian film pioneers in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, was inspired by Fritz Lang and often shot his earliest works in “dark, gothic atmospheric settings” to explore “certain aspects of human nature.”14 His film Strah (Fear, 1933) was inspired by popular news of the Düsseldorf vampire and represented one of the country’s early forays into the territory of horror.15After the Second World War, when major film studios were set up across the newly established six constitutive republics of socialist Yugoslavia, the fairytale film blossomed. Vojislav Nanović’s The Magic Sword (1950)—based on the Serbian tale “Baš Čelik”—was one of the first Yugoslav productions to achieve international success.16 Zagreb became the “epicenter of film fantastique” in this period, with the films of Milan Katić, Nikola Tanhofer, and Dušan Vukotić pioneering fantastique through the short form, dramatic feature, and animated film—the last of these being associated with the renowned Zagreb School of Animation.17 Even Veljko Bulajić—doyen of partisan epics and war films, and often hailed as “Tito’s favorite director”18—made a work that blends fantasy and science fiction in the face of the much more real threat of nuclear war in Rat (Atomic War Bride, 1960).However, it was the directors of the Yugoslav Black Wave, the radical film movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, who broke taboos, transformed the possibilities of film language, and provided existential studies of the human condition unrivaled in cinema. Both Đorđe Kadijević and Krsto Papić are associated with this movement. The Black Wave prominently featured animals and animality. Aleksandar Petrović included representations of the bear in Tri (Three, 1965) and Skupljaci perja (I Even Met Happy Gypsies, 1967) and swine in Bice skoro propast sveta (It Rains in My Village, 1968), while Kadijević represented the calf in Pohod (The Trek, 1968). This theme also appeared in more-figurative terms in Dušan Makavejev’s Covek nije tica (Man Is Not a Bird, 1965), Živojin Pavlović’s Budjenje pacova (The Rats Woke Up, 1967), and Ljubiša Kozomara and Gordan Mihić’s Vrane (Crows, 1969). These films considered animals and animality as part of their explorations of fundamental aspects of human nature, but they also blurred the human–animal divide as a more fundamental critique of society. Both Kadijević, in Praznik (The Feast, 1967) and The Trek, and Papić, in Lisice (Handcuffs, 1969) as well as his collection of short and documentary films, bring an underlying existential depth to their respective navigations of the strange. They pry into the nature of evil and the meanings of human relations, local customs, and national folklore. Where humans’ tendency to become like animals is explored more figuratively in their earlier works, these parallels are made physical in their horror films.Đorđe Kadijević’s The She-Butterfly is acclaimed as the first Yugoslav horror film in which, as Jovan Ristić and Dragan Jovićević remind us, elements of the fantastic and folkloric terror “erupted in all their might,” leaving a generation of viewers permanently shaken.19 After shooting The Feast and The Trek—films that radically rethink human power, responsibility, and faith during dark times—Kadijević was not able to complete the third film of his rural war trilogy and was forced to move to television. The She-Butterfly was produced as part of the series Tales of Mystery and Imagination for Radio Television Belgrade and adapted from Milovan Glišić’s short story After Ninety Years (1880), about the legendary vampire Sava Savanović.20 Intending to make a comedy, Kadijević eventually created a Gogolian reflection on the absurd.21 Though coming in at only sixty-four minutes, the film not only outlived the drama section of the television station for which it was produced but also became known as one of the greatest, if underseen, films in the genre. (The film also provided direct inspiration for Robert Eggers in the making of Nosferatu 2024.)22The She-Butterfly is set in a Serbian village that becomes the prey of a mysterious force that stalks and kills the local inhabitants. Reinventing the vampire in a minimalist and naturalistic rural setting, the film portrays an ancient evil that activates the human-as-animal and the darkness lurking within the soul. The titular lead character, Radojka, played by the extraordinary Mirjana Nikolić, is shown as a young blond virgin, dressed in folk costume, thin and light “as a butterfly.” Her innocence and beauty are highlighted through intimate close-ups and white linen costuming that sets her apart from the older, all-male world that surrounds her, and is brutish and rough by comparison. She is shown to be deeply in love with Strahinja (Petar Božović), the only other young person represented in the film, who is equally in love with her. Their mutual exchanges are playful and childlike, and they intend to marry, though Radojka’s father, the local patriarch, disapproves of the match. The murder of the local miller sets the village into a state of uninhibited fear, and the men, among them the local priest, set out to uncover who is responsible.While thematizing the men’s investigation, the film also continues to follow Radojka as she remains alone. She is shown as a character deeply connected with nature, often to be found in a vastly forested ambience, or running over the hills. While Kadijević’s film is mostly naturalistic, its soundscape is key to building the horror, through a rural cacophony of birds, trees, and folk singing heightened by the director’s subtle visual use of national costume and folk tradition. The rustling of trees, the repetitive, piercing, and altogether disturbing sound of a single bird, and the traditional chanting of women are remade as a kind of wailing. The nonhuman soundscape thus functions in the film’s production of horror to produce an element of intangibility and otherness. The film shows nature as harbinger of the monstrous “that evolved either deliberately or by accident and incites fear in humanity as both character and audience.”23 This nonhuman soundscape is counterpointed by Radojka’s visual beauty as a folk maiden, showing human beauty gendered through the virgin girl and thus used to signify the furthest point from animality. But the maiden is deeply connected to this uncanny nonhuman soundscape, anticipating the evil to come.The men in the film are shown to make little progress in their investigation and themselves start to behave unnaturally. The characters begin to drink, relish in gluttony, fight among themselves and, at one point, go out of their way to dig up an unidentified corpse and pierce it through the chest (in the vein of the mythology associated with Dracula). However, Kadijević’s consistent use of a naturalist style—observational camerawork, everyday farmer costumes, the use of diegetic voices and nature, and the absence of nondiegetic sound and music—makes their actions appear senseless and banal. The film shows animals taking on human(e) properties. The horse of one of the men is shown throughout the film to be perceptive, obedient to his master, and avoidant of evil, refusing to move past the hidden place where the unseen vampire dwells.At the same time, people appear dishonorable and become evil themselves, with existential fear pushing their souls toward the abyss from which they initially aimed to escape. The best example of this can be found in the penultimate scene of the film, when the couple meet again. Strahinja enters his fiancée’s chambers and seeks to shame her in a fit of drink and malice (the covenant of virginity indicatively being broken in a perverse rather than conjugal environment). At that moment, an open blood-red wound appears on Radojka, and, as Strahinja looks up, he finds her vampirical teeth and beastly face coming out. The scene has often been read in terms of the gendered representation of woman that threatens to eliminate the male line and demolish patriarchal order.24 What is truly horrifying about the sequence, however, is neither its Freudian threat to the male world nor the necessarily fantastical nature of the transformation itself (pointing to a different species, here serving to reinforce the unbridgeable gap between the couple), but the way it acts as a mirrored reflection of a deeper ontological transgression. Sexual assault is portrayed as a violation of the bond of love and a shared life, sowing the seeds of hate and resulting in a bitter and violent death. Radojka’s response, as the vampire unleashed, thus appears as the full realization of an existential fear, one that has less to do with the physical supernatural retaliatory attack itself and more with the descent of the soul into corruption at the moment when the bridegroom dishonors the love of his bride. The film closes with the image of the dead fiancé, atop whose head sits a white butterfly (echoing the Slavic mythological of the witch and the and beauty and the film to the that the animality that in in its of and its of Radojka as a more on the one hand, the ways in which humans are than and on the how and violence by the theme of The She-Butterfly is in the existential fear that people who evil and become evil in the The in this case appears only at the and of the the of a where and paganism and Christianity the film be read as a to of The She-Butterfly also the works of or of the a and Her of as it shows lurking in the of Kadijević made other horror (The and as well as a historical series about the that has been hailed as the achievement in Yugoslav television and its from Papić’s The Rat is a to The She-Butterfly it how animality works as urban nightmare in to rural on 1924 short story Rat and to Zagreb, The Rat a poor writer who a of that the to As his investigation he sees that are all the human of the Papić the story through a of science fiction, and as an or Papić the Black Wave and the series of short documentary films My 1968), and which aspects of society, everyday life, and the voices of unseen and/or In to his into horror, he also made the drama in the of and the (The of Nikola from a to and the tension between and rural The Rat existential fear as an a transformation that be and an and altogether critique of society by and an evil lurking the writer by the and a face in the films of the Black portrayed as an young on his His at the and the is as a visual to existential fear in and The of begins through a where animals in a and Papić with in while to the threat of an of the from the use of chiaroscuro and to the of from the of the Even in such as a the film a through the camera and by people in the The film the visual of a that that of a as the people who through the The of the in the and the human in the as the film As the the of Zagreb to the an of the that the physical of the appear like a of and the and the and urban the film appears set in a the The She-Butterfly shows and physical transformation of person to in a rural ambience, The Rat a drama that shows the and transformation of a city’s inhabitants into creatures, heightened by an urban context made more as a of gradual transformation its in a during which a from a with the writer the sees that the are the and of society, but dressed and like They make and relish their and Papić of and with a while the film a about the and it is it parallels between and socialist However, while Papić’s critique of society is of a Black Wave tendency to both and about either the film a much of and the for people to become of critique of and the of in the of society, with the head of the rat that the city’s is in the The the and that the and the dark of voices during this produce a aesthetic that the of a rather than science while the supernatural nature of an with a nonhuman to the the this is made and film’s and for a to that can be connected to The the city’s is not with real but with the ways in which people one In an of it is the society, and not who are portrayed as rat The Rat at the heart of the of in the Croatian and in a more way what it looks like when the are on the by the The of in the film’s is connected not with a on human as on the cultural history of the with a creature that to Building on the of this of the rat in the film its to on the to in (the rat being a common in and it on its head by showing the face of a for science was an of in the of transformation of a human into a only with to one person in The She-Butterfly, the physical transformation of an urban into rat people in The Rat a critique of the urban society that the of This of physical be as a to the work of while anticipating the films of us that the film also has much in common with Yugoslav horror films of the that between drama and point of would be made one on a who the and a across The film is an point of it a that to the of and the of through and animality and fear of horror, The Rat what it means to be what it means to be a and hidden people at and in the absence of of animality and of existential and fear in Đorđe Kadijević’s The She-Butterfly and Krsto Papić’s The Rat a point for the and history of Yugoslav horror cinema. The development of the horror film in this specific historical and cultural the of the fantastique the earliest of a context for the Kadijević’s film on the story of the Serbian vampire the to a of and the nature of evil, while Papić’s film acts as a critique that with and the butterfly and the rat these films to well their Yugoslav context.