[1][4][5][6] Grumpy landowner Živan visits a watermill on the edge of the forest, bringing wheat to be milled into flour.

The two spot Živan's daughter Radojka on the hill with her sheep and Vule comments how beautiful she is, stating that she looks "like a she-butterfly".

While he sleeps, a millstone suddenly stops working and a strange human-like creature with black hands, hairy face and long teeth enters the mill.

While passing through Zarožje, he meets the villagers discussing the cursed mill and accepts their offer to become the new miller.

While the priest reads a prayer, they nail a hawthorn stake through the coffin and attempt to pour holy water into the hole.

In accordance with an old custom, an old woman is tasked with guarding the house in which the bride-to-be is staying, in order to prevent the couple from consummating their relationship before marriage.

She jumps onto Strahinja's back and leads him to Sava's grave, where she forces him to remove the stake out of the coffin.

The coffin opens, and a doppelganger of Radojka in her vampiric form climbs out of it, with the same stake-made wound between her breasts.

In a 2023 interview, Kadijević stated that in the early 1970s he was forced to turn away from cinema and venture into directing for television, as he had been a prominent figure of the Yugoslav Black Wave movement and the authorities' censorship in cinema was starting to strengthen:[7] All of us who made similar films—Dušan Makavejev, Žika Pavlović, Aleksandar "Saša" Petrović, Želimir Žilnik, Kokan Rakonjac and so on—were labeled as representatives of the "Black Wave", as we were, mildly and restrainedly, critical of the apologetics of both the revolutionary past as well as the "heroic, renewal-focused post-World War II enthusiasm".

Saša Petrović lost his professorial job at the Academy of Theatre, Film, Radio and Television.

Makavejev was stripped of any chance to make movies [in Yugoslavia], so he went abroad as he had already gained a measure of international recognition.

[4] Kadijević found the strange sounds that can be heard throughout the film with the help of the workers of Television Belgrade musical department.

He drags a timber into the mill and covers it with a blanket, making it seem like a lying person, and hides in the attic with two rifles.

[10] While in the film the vampire(ss) is depicted as a hairy, dark-skinned creature, in the story Sava Savanović is described as a "rather tall man with a blood-red face" and "a linen cloak across his shoulders, falling down his back to his heels".

[11] When the villagers open the coffin, they find Sava's body preserved "as if laid there yesterday", with blood-red skin and "stuffed like a turkey".

[10] In the original story, the narrator explains that the butterfly escaping from Sava's body "could not harm grown people"[12] and that it "had been taking life of children from Zarožje and Ovčina long time before it disappeared".

[1] After Sava Savanović is killed and Strahinja and Radojka are wed, the celebration is visited by Živan, who, realizing he has no other choice, makes peace with the couple and the Zarožje villagers, and the newlyweds return to their homevillage.

It was preceded by two films, both also directed by Kadijević for Television Belgrade, Darovi moje rođake Marije (The Gifts of My Cousin Maria, 1969) and Štićenik (The Ward, 1973),[1][3] the first inspired by a story by Serbian writer Momčilo Nastasijević and the latter based on a story by Serbian writer Filip David.

He stated that he viewed Leptirica as a fantasy film dealing with the presence of metaphysical evil in the human conscience.