‘A Serbian Film’ Shouldn’t be Condemned
I need to start with a story. In middle school, we had just the one family computer shared among seven people. I was conspiratorial and technologically inept, and I irrationally feared that my parents had a direct line of contact with our ISP. Like most queer persons my age, I first started to understand my identity, and popular media was a wasteland of representation. I needed the internet to look at photos of “boys kissing” and “Nick Lachey shirtless,” but I couldn’t use the desktop. Instead, I used my PSP and the native web browser. Those fears persisted, so rather than search for anything obvious, I instead logged into Myspace, navigated to Tom’s profile, and clicked through his friends until I’d inevitably arrive at a profile dedicated to PG gay porn. If the ISP reported my web browsing, all they’d see is a common social media site.
It’s funny in retrospect, clutch-my-heart in agony painful when accounting for how it really felt at the time. I don’t need to relitigate sex education, identity, and queer culture among suburban kids in the early 2000s, but it was a horrifying time. I was so enmeshed in fear and shame, I didn’t kiss another guy until I was 19, and didn’t come out until I was 25. And that was the point. Hegemonic forces and a conservative culture war endeavored to dredge up old language and render me monstrous because of who I was. I’m not the first to say it, but conservative political organizing has worked as intended, because now general audiences are wielding the pitchforks and torches. Case in point? The recent A Serbian Film discourse.
Now, disclaimer. I have not seen A Serbian Film, nor do I intend to do so. I’m old enough now to recognize my own boundaries when it comes to horror, especially extreme horror, and I don’t think it’s something I could manage. Whatever efficacy or meaning might be nestled within will have to come from A Serbian Film’s lengthy synopsis on the film’s Wikipedia page. If you are a fan, well… I have some bad news.
The Discourse
Per IMDB, “An aging porn star agrees to participate in an ‘art film’ in order to make a clean break from the business, only to discover that he has been drafted into making a pedophilia and necrophilia themed snuff film.”
I’m spending considerably less time online now than I did in the past several years, so I’m not regularly kept abreast of whatever horror community is discoursing about on any given day. I did happen to log in amid the A Serbian Film debacle, and for the most part, it was pretty benign. More than that, it was beyond my perspective because, again, I’d never seen the film. But then things took an ugly turn. I won’t share any tweets in particular, because I’m not sure who is actually posting. It’s easy to hide behind anonymity online, and those most vocal persons might be from the Baby’s First Horror Movie crowd, and I earnestly don’t want any hate or attacks directed their way.
The broad perspective was that by virtue of liking A Serbian Film, one was no different than the villains in the movie. Here are some common sentiments, quoted directly from the discussion. “If you enjoyed A Serbian Film, I want nothing to do with you as a person.” There was also, “Prove your way out of prison, freak,” and the parallel, “Check their hard drives.” There were also earnest calls to get A Serbian Film’s fans added to an FBI watchlist.
Maybe it’s Twitter discourse and nothing more, a microcosm of terminally online folk lacking in media literacy having a debate they’re not really equipped to manage. There’s a chance, but I’m not so sure, largely because it’s a pattern we’ve seen before, and increasingly more often in recent years. Queer and trans people are, within the broader culture, reduced to pedophiles or deviants. That language is heavy and has profoundly terrifying consequences. Whether it’s a horror movie or someone’s humanity, that language is loaded, and too regularly used irresponsibly.
The Language
Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law’s Cyber Law Clinic and a transgender-rights advocate, remarked to NBC News that such language is “an attempt at the dehumanization and delegitimization of queer people’s identities by associating them with pedophilia and child grooming,” further adding, “when you start labeling groups with that, the calls for violence are inevitable.” The UCLA School of Law, working from the 2022 and 2023 National Crime Victimization Survey results, contended that LGBT persons were five times more likely than non-LGBT persons to be victims of a violent crime, and nine times more likely to experience violent hate crimes.
The pattern is there. Dehumanize a group of people. Label them monsters. Attack them. Michael Bronski, a professor of women and gender studies at Harvard University, remarked, “There’s a long tradition of making accusations against a minority group, potentially an unpopular one, using the notion of violating childhood innocence, which is seen as the worst possible thing that you could do – to abuse the child sexually.” The violence will inevitably follow, and that’s the point. It always has been.
The Film
Now, A Serbian Film is not a queer movie, nor is it directly tethered to the current political landscape. But that discourse is meaningfully and purposefully there on the periphery, and it’s no less troubling. After all, the default rejoinder was to simply label the film’s fans sexual deviants and pedophiles, because once you’ve done so, there’s nothing else you need to do. You’ll always be right. But that’s a critically disingenuous response, and an increasingly dangerous one. That’s being a pawn as conservative forces mobilize power—you’re fighting their culture war for them.
The history of film, whether through the Hays Code or the video nasty phenomenon, has always been about subjugation. Subjugate the identities and voices of persons deemed other. We all go to the movies, and that commonality renders it auspicious for lawmakers and lobbyists in power to frame the cinematic experience as the frontline of ostensibly deviant behavior. We need to protect our kids from Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer, and if you think differently… what? You want to hurt kids?
But from my understanding, A Serbian Film isn’t just exploitative shock, a dog whistle from terrible people to vicariously live their fantasies. Filmmaker Srđan Spasojević has pretty eloquently contextualized what’s arguably this century’s most controversial horror movie. Speaking to Slobodna Dalmacija (Free Dalmatia), a Croatian daily paper in 2010, Spasojević shared, “[A Serbian Film] in a metaphorical way deals with the consequences of post-war society and a man that is exploited to the extreme in the name of securing the survival.” He additionally drew inspiration from Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi and the “notion of modern-day colonialism via sexual exploitation of a poor country’s human resource.”
Understanding
No different than titles like Megalomaniac or The Treatment, there’s something there amid the bloodshed and horrifying depictions of barbarous acts. I’ve seen the aforementioned titles, and while I never want to see them again, there was something worth seeing, and the acknowledgement of such doesn’t make me any more like the Butcher of Mons. Raw, unfiltered content challenges the culture. Pushing boundaries is the point. You might not like it—and I’m not sure it’s meant to be liked—but it can be appreciated.
Horror movies are politics, but they’re not ethics. Someone drawn toward exploitation cinema has their reasons, and within their own, singular media framework, that’s for them to interrogate and understand. It’s not for me or anyone else, certainly not when doing so is quite literally a tacit endorsement of encroaching conservative ideals that very specifically intend to target queer persons and BIPOC. Just consider the assessment of Sinner’s box office performance compared to The Accountant 2’s. It is happening whether we pay attention or not.
Witney Seibold, writing for Slashfilm, penned an editorial titled “Why A Serbian Film Is Misunderstood, And More Relevant Than Ever.” He argues such films exist to “move [audiences] to a level of disgust so intense that they cannot help but push their mind into the realm of politics and philosophy.” He does a remarkable job tethering A Serbian Film to the fascist, totalitarian rule of Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. Interrogating that does not render a viewer a “pedophile.”
And to revisit my anecdote from the start, horror fans need to explicitly circumvent that kind of shame and condemnation. Condemn the film for being bad, but not under some thinly veiled conservative politics. Horror is a bastion of diversity and transgressive ideals from voices too regularly marginalized elsewhere. It’s why, alongside my Myspace voyeurism, I was also enraptured anytime Jason X was playing on the Sci-Fi (before rebranding) channel. I found myself in horror amidst a culture that branded me a predator. And when it comes to predators, leave that to Dan Trachtenberg, not Twitter threads.
Categorized:Editorials
