Leptirica

• Adapted from Milovan Glišić's 1880 short story 'After Ninety Years' (Posle devedeset godina), which drew on Serbian peasant folklore and put the vampire Sava Savanović on the page 17 years before Bram Stoker's 1897 Dracula.
• Widely credited as the first Serbian/Yugoslav horror film. It was a TV production for Radiotelevizija Beograd, first broadcast 15 April 1973, with a 63-minute runtime, shot in under a month.
• Filmed in the village of Zelinje near the Drina River, close to Zvornik, leaning into authentic rural Slavic texture rather than imitating the American or Western European horror of the era. The 19th-century mill used in the film still stands at its original location.
• The vampire's look is pure practical makeup, and Radojka's transformation turns the beautiful young woman into a hairy, decayed creature, the film's most infamous image.
• The unnerving night soundscape used recordings of a bird species from the uninhabited regions of India, sourced through Television Belgrade's music department, so the vampire's cry wouldn't read as any familiar local animal.
• Robert Eggers named Leptirica an influence on his 2024 Nosferatu, calling it 'visually naïve and yet terrifying,' and programmed it in his Nosferatu-influences film series at Film at Lincoln Center in February 2025. The Sava Savanović legend it cemented resurfaced in 2012, when the collapse of the old watermill prompted a Zarožje council member to urge locals to hang garlic and crosses against the freed vampire.

The title gives away the rules. The 'leptirica' (she-butterfly/moth) that flutters from the disturbed coffin isn't decoration; it's the vampiric soul in transit. When it lands on Radojka, the curse is reseeded into a new host, which is why the threat doesn't end with staking Sava. The horror isn't a monster you can kill; it's an essence that always finds the next body.

Strahinja surviving by hiding under the flour sacks reads less like luck and more like the folk-tale's own moral arithmetic: the mill devours the greedy and the proud, and the one pure-hearted outsider with nothing to lose is the only one it spares, right up until love itself becomes the trap that damns him.

The film sits deliberately between dread and dark comedy because Kadijević saw the vampire as metaphysical evil in the human conscience rather than a creature feature. The bumbling elders digging up graves are the real subject, a village so steeped in superstition that it manufactures the monster it fears, then can't stop it from coming home.

A riverside watermill keeps killing its millers, and the villagers know why: Sava Savanović, ninety years dead, climbs out of his grave to drink. Desperate to keep the wheel turning, they install poor, lovesick Strahinja as bait. He survives the night by burrowing under the flour sacks while a hooded, fanged thing claws the dark. The elders dig up the grave, fail to pin the soul, and a butterfly escapes the coffin, carrying the curse straight into Radojka, the girl Strahinja loves. Folk-tale logic, no escape clause.