A SERBIAN FILM soundtrack

Love it or loath it, you can't deny the impact of Srdjan Spasojevic's notorious atrocity exhibition. One of A Serbian Film's stronger elements is Wikluh Sky's menacing score, the perfect complement for the film's slick display of onscreen depravity. As far as I know it's never had an official release of any kind, and I'd long ago given up on trying to find it. Then out of the blue the other day, I stumbled on this youtube stream of the full OST.

The surefire hit is obviously "Balkan Sex God". With a sinister and monotonous dubstep plod, it plays like the soundtrack to every skeezy strip club and fluoro-lit nightclub toilet in Eastern Europe. It's the banality of evil set to music. A good track to be sure, but the real winner for me is "Decollection", a haunting pizzicato rendition of the film's theme, accompanied by malevolent synth and the tormented howls of poor Milos' damned soul.

0:00 - The End

3:18 - Tone Deaf

8:23 - Decollection

11:18 - Rigor Mortis

14:25 - Radio Rave

20:28 - Serbia

24:40 - Unsee It

26:56 - Le Club Filth

31:22 - W.F.S.

38:30 - Balkan Sex God

Fuck The OFLC

Our forceful guardians of dubious morality, the OFLC, have been quite busy in the last couple of years. Oh yes.

Last year they banned Bruce LaBruce's L.A. Zombie outright. The scissor-happy sadists then refused to grant it a festival exemption, which would have allowed it to play at the Melbourne International Film Festival where it was already scheduled to do so. The MIFF organisers got cold feet and cancelled the screening.

Shortly after that, Richard Wolstencroft (director of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival) organised for a screening of the film to be held at MUFF, in protest of the OFLC's actions. The screening went ahead, but not long after Richard was rewarded for his troubles by having his house raided by police and charges laid against him. That debacle is still being played out in the courts.

Then last December the OFLC flew into another fit of tooth-grinding moral outrage while enduring a viewing of Srdjan Spasojevic's A Serbian Film. Of course their reaction to it was to freak out and ban the fuck out of it. Later, after the film's Australian distributor trimmed two minutes of carnage and resubmitted it... they banned that cut too! On the third submission (with three minutes excised) they finally relented and granted it an R18+, but the fully uncut film remains contraband in this country.

The silver lining to all this is that, with impeccable timing, Shawn Lewis and the other degenerates at Rotten Cotton have recently unleashed a line of t-shirts to celebrate the transgressive boundary destruction that is A Serbian Film. It couldn't be a better time to show your support for freedom of artistic expression and your distaste for the censor's shears. There's three designs to choose from (I'm partial to "MILOS" myself), and you can order right HERE.

More info on censorship in Australia HERE.

UPDATE: Well, I just learned that I'm a bit out of touch... according to their website the OFLC (The Office of Film and Literature Classification) ceased to exist back in 2006, and to quote their FAQ: "its responsibilities were transferred to the Classification Board and the Classification Review Board and the Attorney-General's Department." Anyway, it's just the same bunch of puritanical bureaucrats operating under a different name.

So it's just the "Classification Board" now is it? How much more Orwellian sounding can you get?

Srpski Film

It's probably lazy when writing about film to continually resort to comparison with other films, but I still find myself doing it a lot. Perhaps it's particularly hard to avoid when discussing horror, because it's a genre that's continually feeding off of itself for new ideas. To paraphrase something I read at Fangoria recently, horror cinema gets by for the most part by cyclically regurgitating popular tropes and cliches, delivering what the fans are perceived to be hungering for at the time. The industry toils along in this opportunistic fashion, becoming more and more predictable and stale, until the next fresh idea is introduced in a new groundbreaking and original film. Yet sometimes a movie is original enough to stand on it's own, while comparisons to previous movies are still impossible to avoid. One such movie is Srdjan Spasojevic's A Serbian Film.

A Serbian Film feels as if Spasojevic watched the Hostel movies, and rather than being insulted by Roth's exaggerated perception of the troubles in post-soviet eastern Europe, saw it as a challenge to up the ante as far as disgust and brutality.

Above a subtext about American ignorance and xenophobia, Hostel is about the potential for entrepreneurial capitalists to exploit the instability that has resulted from rapid social, economic and political changes in the region (former Czechoslovakia in Hostel). However, it does so using a premise that is absurdly far fetched, requiring a major suspension of disbelief to go along with.

A Serbian Film on the other hand is grounded in a terror that is all too real and which is frequently seen in the news and dramatised on TV - the burgeoning illegal sex slave trade. The only really unrealistic element of Spasojevic's film is the snuff-industry angle, an urban myth that has been shown to be just that - a myth (see David Kerekes' & David Slater's excellent Killing For Culture: An Illustrated History Of Death Film From Mondo To Snuff published by Creation Books). Beyond that though, the events depicted in A Serbian Film are believable and are all the more appalling for that realism. Compounded with that sense of reality, the explicitly depicted atrocities in A Serbian Film make the violence in Roth's movies pale by comparison, making the whole experience that much more visceral, disturbing and just plain vile.


Another recent movie that has to be mentioned when talking about A Serbian Film (and Hostel I & II) is Martyrs. Beyond the similarities in premise (highly organised secret societies with paramilitary elements; torture and killing for ideological and financial motives) the four movies share a similar visual aesthetic. They're all shot, lit and colour graded with a kind of hyper-real slickness (particularly Srpski and the Hostel movies), and in the production design of the secret institutions all four films share a clinical, futuristic look that is more akin to science fiction movies than horror.

Beyond that comparison with Martyrs though, the more obvious similarity between the two movies is that it's the current Euro-horror film that is both topical and utterly transgressive in it's violence. This year's most talked about cult film for hardcore horror freaks. So, I guess my final word on A Serbian Film is what I see as the differences in motivation for Laugier and Spasojevic.

Almost every review I've read for Spasojevic's disgust-fest mentions the almost impenetrable ambiguity of it's "message" about the current state of affairs in Serbia. Western observers are looking for a meaning beneath it's violence and coming up with an almost unanimous cry of "I can't work it out, I guess you have to be Serbian to understand it". I can't fault all of these reviewers for seeking that deeper meaning, because I strongly believe that in much the same way as T.F. Mous' notorious Men Behind The Sun, Srpski is posing as a message movie to give it more gravitas, but ultimately it's little more than a very well made, highly memorable exploitation flick. Perhaps in both cases there was an original "higher" intention that was eventually lost in the desire to simply be as nasty as possible.


Martyrs could also be criticised for having a dubious and ambiguous meaning, but what Martyrs has in spades that Srpski lacks... is heart. As mean spirited and hard to watch as it is, it's a deeply emotive and affecting movie because you care for Lucie and Anna and witnessing their fate is heartbreaking. The horrible fate of Milos and his family did not elicit that emotion in me, just a dull sense of shock and revulsion.

I think the difference in the two director's intentions is most evident in Laugier's widely publicised assertions that the writing of Martyrs came from a deeply heartfelt place within him, at a time when he was going through a difficult period of particularly black depression. When I watch his film, I can see and feel all that emotion up on the screen. When I watch Spasojevic's Film I see a cynical, sneering exercise in depravity lurking shallowly beneath a thin veneer of sociopolitical commentary about porn, the illegal sex trade and some dodgy allusions to the Yugoslav wars. Just another exploitation flick, albeit one of the most disgusting ones I've ever seen.

After all that you might think that I hated A Serbian Film...

... but I actually really liked it.

Why? Because - like you - I'm a card carrying sicko!