Leptirica (Đorđe Kadijević, 1973)
(there are spoilers in this review!)
"My neighbor told me the vampire keeps eating his millers so I asked how many millers he has and he said he just goes to the village and finds a new shiftless young man to be the miller afterwards so I said it sounds like he's just feeding millers to the vampire and then his daughter started crying."
it's tempting to think of this as a movie that has a twist, but it's so well telegraphed (literally by the title and a line of dialogue in the first scene!) that the only reason it's surprising is if you've spent your life marinating in the way vampires (and to a lesser extent, werewolves) have been depicted in English-language media for the last hundred years. still, the film's inclusion in Severin's All the Haunts Be Ours collection means that a lot of people will be seeing it from that perspective, me included.
even having a little familiarity with Slavic vampire lore, i was actually taken by surprise at the revelation that Radojka was, in fact, the vampire. but not as surprised as her erstwhile lover, Strahinja, and the scene of her sitting on his shoulders and riding him like a horse back to her grave, to make him remove the stake they'd rudely stuck through it, is incredibly effective. not scary, as such, but truly otherworldly feeling, along with the fucked-up owl-monkey call that is heard whenever she's around, and the layered choral harmonies that are the movie's only soundtrack.
3/5