She-Butterfly
Based loosely on Milovan Glišić’s classic 1880 Serbian vampire story After Ninety Years, which preceded Bram Stoker’s Dracula by nearly two decades, Đorđe Kadijević’s adaptation is a subversive, darkly erotic take on Glišić’s pastoral tale of a group of rural villagers beset upon by the infamous vampire Sava Savanović, who has taken up residence in their local flour mill. Scaring off all the millers in succession leaves an opening for young Strahinja, who has been desperate for a way to win approval to marry the beautiful daughter of the village’s wealthiest landowner. But is he prepared for the deadly secret of the She-Butterfly? Kadijević takes dramatic license with the original story but retains the hypnotic day-to-day of a remote village steeped in superstition and boredom, punctuated by some breathtaking and shocking moments that draw on the rich material of Slavic folklore.
Kadijević, Đorđe is one of the most renowned Serbian filmmakers. Born in 1933 in Šibenik in today’s Croatia, he was part of the Yugoslav Black Wave with contemporaries like Dušan Makavejev and Želimir Žilnik. Best remembered by younger audiences for his horror movies, including She-Butterfly, he is also famous for the 1987/88 historical drama TV series on Serbian language reformer Vuk Karadžić. Finding renewed critical appreciation since the aughties, his (auto)biography Više od istine: Kadijević o Kadijeviću was published in 2017.
