Abstract

Most scholarly discussion of 'A Serbian Film' (2010) has focused upon its transgressive qualities, incorporating issues of reception, censorship and national identity. Such approaches have been bound by an evaluation of the film’s social, historical and cultural value amid a brace of condemnatory and censorious institutional responses. Claims for the film’s importance have ranged from discussion of its status as an allegorical work which addresses recent national trauma, to its properties as an ‘extreme’ object ripe for fan appropriation and debate. These are all eminently sensible methods through which we can begin to understand the varied discourses and strategies of a modern horror film which has instigated outrage, condemnation and suppression in a set of distinctive national contexts.
To take discussion of the film into other areas, this chapter considers its generic features, and more specifically, evaluates it as an evolutionary rendition of cinematic themes and tropes that were set in motion over 50 years ago. The 21st century has witnessed a distinctive upturn in the visibility and availability of images of real death, a situation accommodated significantly by rapid advances in digital technology and online access. However, although the film is fluent and sophisticated as a contemporary nightmare that explores the limits and consequences of human consumption, control and exploitation, it has also re-visited and re-interpreted the established mythology of the porno-snuff film at a time when the most resonant and familiar moving images of actual murder have been of hostages bound, beheaded and burned by ideologically motivated captors, in a conflict that continues to be fought on a shifting geo-political stage.
Therefore, this discussion of 'A Serbian Film' will combine historical and textual methods to emphasise its status not only as a key example of the fictional snuff sub-genre, but also as a text which engages and interrogates a range of universal social fears and anxieties which have developed on several ideological platforms.