By Terry Sherwood
Everything old is new again” is a wonderful song lyric, and in a strange way it applies to the afterlife of A Serbian Film. Many have never seen the movie, while others know it only through one single moment the infamous “baby scene” much like the scandalous reputation of the old “video nasties.” In horror lore, its infamy has mutated into something like anarchistic theatre: punk rock with a camera. Loud, defiant, and unapologetically offensive.
Stephen Biro’s A Serbian Documentary revisits the film that is still whispered about in genre circles. As the documentary shows, A Serbian Film has always inspired extremity in reaction. The picture demands that audiences choose sides. Some call it as a subversive political allegory, others damn it as irredeemable trash. The political subtext being a howl against Serbian corruption and decay is real enough, but it is smothered beneath an avalanche of sexual violence, bloodshed. Those images lodge deeper in the psyche like society eating itself literally becomes the allegory.
What the documentary does make clear is that Srjdan Spasojevic is no hack but a passionate, intelligent filmmaker who wanted to scar cinema’s memory. His words against censorship may not excuse the atrocities he depicted, but his frustration with the limits of Serbian media is. What’s surprising is how much warmth in the behind-the-scenes footage is revealed on set: a collaborative crew, actors laughing between takes, the mechanics of prosthetics laid bare. It’s hard to square those moments with the brutality of the finished product, and yet that tension is where the fascination lies.
The talking-head segments are familiar in form the stories of theatrical training, artistic intention, the refusal to call it “a horror movie.” Particularly refreshing are the voices of female cast members, such as Lena Bogdanovic, who spoke of how Serbian cinema typically reduces women to mothers or girlfriends. Even in a film as toxic as A Serbian Film, she saw a chance to play against type.
Where A Serbian Documentary is most compelling is in how it inadvertently brushes up against ideas beyond horror. Watching it, I was reminded not only of punk rock’s gleeful chaos but of the radical theatre experiments of France in the 1960s. Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle argued that modern life had become a stage dominated by consumerism and alienation. His “Situationist” philosophy urged people to disrupt that spectacle through radical interventions like theatrical events staged in the streets, acts meant to shatter the illusion and confront society with its own corruption.
In its own crude, nihilistic way, A Serbian Film operates as a grotesque Situationist gesture. It tears down the curtain of respectability and replaces it with a nightmare you cannot unsee. Biro’s documentary doesn’t quote Debord, but one could easily imagine Spasojevic subscribing to a similar ethos: cinema not as entertainment but as provocation, an attack on complacency. Just as Debord’s theatre shocked audiences out of passivity, A Serbian Film shocks viewers into confrontation with violence, exploitation, and the politics of survival in a decaying society.
Seen through this lens, the documentary’s failure to probe more deeply into the controversy feels like a missed opportunity. We see snippets like Emily Booth announcing the BBFC ban at FrightFest, mentions of SXSW and William Friedkin’s praise but not the full cultural battlefield. The burning of prints, the global bans, the whispered conversations among horror fans: these are less about gore than about the spectacle of censorship and rebellion
Much like its subject, A Serbian Documentary is both fascinating and frustrating. It entertains, informs, and offers moments of revelation, but it seldom cuts deep enough to reframe A Serbian Film for its audience. For those who despise the movie, this won’t change your mind. For defenders, it provides little fresh ammunition and will get some to view it again or the first time.
A Serbian Documentary screened as part of Frightfest 2025.
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