I have watched this movie after finding out about it online. I didn't expect to watch overwhelming special effects or perfect film making. Keep in mind this was filmed in the '70s in Yugoslavia, and for TV. To make things worse, the recording I watched wasn't of extremely high quality (maybe a rip from a very old home recorded VHS).

The movie is seriously scary, but with some comedic relief which might be considered annoying if you don't expect to see them. Plot turns and surprises are well thought of in most instances. There is no attempt to "explain" the plot to the audience , as commonly happens with more modern western movies. I find this to be a nice thing, but some may find it a problem. The vampire the movie tells about is not a typical vampire from western movies, but maybe the retelling or older and more original Slavic legends.

The actress playing the protagonist's love interest was a treat. Beautiful and convincing, hard to believe she did not appear in famous movies. Effects rudimentary, but kind of convincing. Scares real. True that the vampire appears in three scenes: that's enough however. Those appearances are sudden, and only in one case can be expected.

Definitely advise for horror fans (with the caveat you are not watching Hollywood).

Taking a look at reviews by a fellow IMDber,I spotted a review for the first ever Horror film from Serbia.With the October Horror Challenge taking place on IMDb's Horror board,I decided that it was the perfect time to catch the She-Butterfly.

The plot:

Spending his life in a village terrorised by a creature called who kills anyone who works at the towns lone mill, Živan keeps a close eye on his daughter Radojka.Falling for Radojka, Strahinja asks for her hand in marriage.With Strahinja not even having a roof over his head, Živan dismisses the offer.Hurt by the dismissal, Strahinja gets a job at the cursed mill,and soon finds himself milling with the mythical creature.

View on the film:

Made for TV, (where it was first shown at dinner time,as a treat for the whole family!)writer/director Djordje Kadijevic & cinematographer Branko Ivatovic give the film a gritty folk horror atmosphere,by filling the town with rotting buildings and thick slabs of stone.Threading the whispered tales around the viewer, Kadijevic gets the audience to join the very close-knitted community,by keeping things down to earth with tightly held shots which reveal the myths that bind the villagers together.

Adapting Milovan Glisic story Posle devedeset godina,the screenplay by Kadijevic gives the She-Butterfly creature a sharp Gothic bite,by slowly releasing vague details on the creatures appearance,which allows the viewer to create their own "full" image of the beast,before Kadijevic delivers a wonderfully grisly twist ending.Building a firm rural backdrop, Kadijevic keeps the drama between Živan & Strahinja off-centre,thanks to Živan's sly looks over Strahinja surviving deadly obstacles in order to get Radojka's hand in marriage, gradually revealing that Živan knows the truth behind the butterfly effect.

A fellow IMDb user alerted me that this 70's TV movie was in fact the very first horror movie from Yugoslavia. I can't honestly say I have actually seen any others myself but this fact did leave me somewhat intrigued for sure. In the event, Leptirica proved to be a very fascinating watch indeed and one which suggests that the Serbs are missing a trick in not having made more horror films steeped in their folklore. Like most vampire films from other parts of Europe, the events in this one take place in the 19th century. More specifically, the action occurs in a rural village which relies on a cursed mill in which a succession of millers have been murdered in the night by a vampire, a being who once was called Sava Savanovic, a man who died one hundred years ago. Unlike most other European vampire presentations, though, the creature here is a long way off the sophisticated aristocratic blood-sucker variety and is instead a filthy feral beast with excess body hair, sharp nails and teeth. This seems to tie in more accurately with the traditional Serbian model which is like a cross-over between a vampire and a werewolf. I very much appreciated the difference here and had never before seen a depiction of this creature done quite in this way. It felt a very authentic rendering and one which seemed to have emerged organically from Serbian culture.

Similar to the tradition of fairy-tales from eastern and central Europe, there is also a fearless ambiguity to how events are played out on screen. Many aspects are never explained fully and remain tantalisingly remote and enigmatic. The vampire itself emerges suddenly and aggressively, it performs strange rituals such as covering its hands in flour, while it appears to mysteriously exist partially as a butterfly. These types of unusual details possibly are not explained fully as the intended Yugoslavian television audience perhaps were expected to understand them from widely told folk tales from that country. I don't know for sure if that is true but whatever the case, the result is to the overall benefit of the film as far as I am concerned as unexplained mysteries often work best when it comes to strange supernatural stories. After all, the unknown is often the lair of the scariest things of all. When the horror moments occur in this movie, they are often very effective and chilling, with the vampire itself a memorably scary creature, who indulges in witchy behaviour such as riding its victim. It's nice to see that this old television movie from the former Yugoslavia has been developing an appreciative audience over the years. It's a very interesting alternative indeed to the more traditional Gothic fare from Western Europe.