Stage Fright

A musical rehearsal runs late into the night. The company secretly takes an injured colleague to a psychiatric hospital, and someone from inside gets into the car. To keep the rehearsal from breaking up, the director locks the theatre doors and hides the key under the stage. The killer inside has a stage costume: an enormous owl's head. The subject is not suspense but staging death in the same light as a performance. The killer arranges the murders, positions the bodies on stage, and at the end sits alone watching the tableau he has built; the film stops completely for that scene. The form belongs to the Italian thriller tradition: coloured light, roving camera, smoke. The owl mask departs from the genre's habits, and the reason it frightens is exactly that it looks absurd. It is Michele Soavi's first film as director. He had worked previously alongside Dario Argento and Lamberto Bava, and the film was shot fast and cheap. Almost all of it takes place inside a single theatre, and the constraint works in its favour. Barbara Cupisti leads and David Brandon plays the director. Who it is for: viewers who like eighties Italian horror and slashers built on form. Who it is not for: anyone looking for logic; the characters make bad decisions continuously and the film does not care.