Naprata (2013)

directed by Mladen Milosavljević
Serbia
65 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

Naprata is a quiet little horror movie about a group of filmmakers ostensibly looking to shoot a documentary about violence against women in rural parts of Serbia. It doesn't go too well initially, and the slow first thirty minutes are a bit trying for both viewer and characters, especially considering that it's half of a movie that's only barely over an hour long. There's not a single allusion to this eventually turning into a horror movie until eventually the filmmakers stumble upon a drunk ex-professor who's like "I'm not gonna talk about violence against women. How 'bout some vampires instead" and unloads upon them the story of a folkloric vampire known to inhabit a local swamp. With the help of some other folks, the documentary veers off into this territory instead, abandoning its original premise to do some good old-fashioned vampire hunting.

This sounds a little cheesy now that I'm writing it down, and there's generally a lot of ways to mess up a movie about vampire hunting, but I think how cheesy the subject matter sounds on paper versus how serious it feels within the film itself is a testament to the fact that Naprata really is a good movie. This isn't the sterilized Western conception of a vampire, which is also a reason why this doesn't feel as contrived as a pop vampire flick. This is more along the lines of a revenant or a traditional Eastern-European vampire, where the bloodsucking and aversion to garlic isn't as heavily featured if it's even there at all.

Considering the bare-bones look of the rest of the movie, I was expecting either nothing much to happen when the filmmakers finally found their vampire or for it to have looked goofy, but in reality the outcome was neither of those things. I don't want to spoil anything, but considering that the monster is literally right there on the poster, I would feel bad if I didn't mention that this is genuinely an awesome-looking ghoul. I liked the fact that there's almost no noise whatsoever when it dispatches with the main characters; we just see them each go off into the night ill-advisedly to investigate and then the next thing is the cameraman coming upon their body. We have to make up in our own heads what the Naprata did to them and how it did it.