Monster of the Opera (1964)

Monster of the Opera begins with a very pretty young lady in a semi-transparent nightie, running in terror through a multi-level abandoned building. There are plenty of gothic trappings, moody black-and-white cinematography and lots of Dutch angles. At this point I was thinking to myself that this is my type of movie.

It soon becomes apparent that this isn’t that sort of movie at all. It’s something much odder.

Sandro is a theatrical director-manager. He runs what appears to be some kind of experimental theatre troupe. He’s been trying to find a theatre and finally he’s found one. It’s the building we saw in the opening sequence.

It’s been disused for years. Strange things have happened there in the past, over the course of many years. Leading ladies have mysteriously disappeared.

The structure and pacing of this movie are both very strange. We know that there is a vampire. Or maybe it’s a guy who thinks he’s a vampire. Or maybe it’s a dream. Either way the focus is now on the dramas taking place within the theatre company. And we see the rehearsals and this provides the opportunity for some musical production numbers. The theatrical production seems to be a bizarre mix of musical comedy and avant-garde weirdness.

The old man who acts as caretaker gives giving solemn warnings that the theatre company should flee the theatre although he’s very vague about the reasons.

To add to the other weirdness we get a subtle Phantom of the Opera vibe.

We also get dream sequences, or they may be dream sequences. Maybe dream and reality are one in this decaying old theatre.

The tone shifts wildly. There’s comedy and romance and lighthearted silliness, then there’s some real creepiness, some scares and some mystery. It’s not at all clear how seriously we’re meant to take this movie.

Is this a spoof? Is it intended to be semi-comic? Is this a gothic horror movie or an arty surrealist movie?

The key to the strange goings-on obviously lies in the past. We get glimpses of that past but they’re (initially at least) a bit ambiguous. There’s a possibility that the old caretaker is actually very very old indeed.

Of course it will also occur to us to wonder if this stuff that happened in the past really happened. We also wonder if all the characters are really the people they seem to be.

There’s a perfectly decent gothic horror story here. In fact it’s a nicely twisted plot with some neat totally unexpected turns. It’s just handled very oddly.

One thing that needs to be kept in mind is that this movie was made in 1961 but not released until 1964. In 1961 Italian gothic horror was still in its infancy and this movie is closer in tone to a movie like The Playgirls and the Vampire (1962) than to the movies that were being made in the mid-60s.

There’s no blood and no gruesomeness and no nudity. There are lots of scantily-clad young ladies which would have been very titillating in 1961. Monster of the Opera seems rather tame by 1964 standards. But it’s not as simple as that. It’s tame in terms of overt sexual content. There is however an enormous amount of more subtle and slightly perverse eroticism. There is for example a lot of dancing and the dancing is very obviously reflecting all kinds of erotic obsessions. The director knew he couldn’t get away with nudity in 1961 but he still managed to make a gothic horror movie with an all-pervasive atmosphere of twisted eroticism.

The contribution of screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi is hugely significant. Gastaldi was perhaps the most important of all screenwriters in Italian genre movies of the 60s and 70s. If you come across a really interesting Italian genre movie of this period you are very likely to see Gastaldi’s name in the credits.

Everything about the way director Renato Polselli handles this movie is fascinatingly off-kilter. This is not the way to direct a conventional gothic horror film but Polselli doesn’t care. He has his own ideas and he sticks to them and the result is bizarre but incredibly interesting. Highly recommended.

Monster of the Opera is included in Severin’s Danza Macabra volume 1 boxed set. The transfer is nice and there’s an audio commentary by Kat Ellinger and her commentary really does add enormously to a proper appreciation of this film.