ABCs of Horror 3: "S" Is for Stage Fright (1987)

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Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?

Much has been written over the years about the clear, evolutionary influence of the Italian giallo horror genre on the development and popularization of the American slasher film. The giallo long predates the genuine slasher movie, existing from at least 1963’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much, ultimately codified by films like Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace or Dario Argento’s The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. Most of these films tend to bear passing resemblance to what would become the American slasher genre–solitary killers, over-the-top deaths, a body count, etc.–but none of them really go all the way, despite some coming close to our investigative slasher definition, like A Bay of Blood. Despite that, they would all go on to influence (but be transformed) the first wave of western slasher films, beginning with the likes of Black Christmas in 1974.

But here’s the thing: Influence is not a one way street. It wasn’t just American filmmakers absorbing (and outright stealing) giallo elements, as when Friday the 13th Part II famously replicated two entire kills right out of A Bay of Blood. Through the golden era of the American slasher film in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Italians were also watching our own output, and they were learning a thing or two simultaneously. And that is how you end up with an odd beast like 1987’s Stage Fright (also known under many titles such as Bloody Bird, Aquarius and Sound Stage Massacre), the most perfect 50-50 fusion I’ve ever encountered of American slasher and colorfully outlandish Italian giallo sensibilities, a veritable horror chimera that reflects every influence of the decade before it. It’s somehow both things, and more.

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Stage Fright comes courtesy of director Michele (or Michael) Soavi, in his feature length debut–perhaps a minor name alongside some of the other Italian horror icons of the era, but a notable one all the same, particularly for his 1994 surrealist horror comedy Cemetery Man, which has a cult following of its own. This film is notable for the fact that it has an oddly similar stylistic mirror image in the form of 1987’s Opera from Dario Argento, on which Soavi also worked as second unit director. Both are giallo-slasher hybrids set around a theater, in which the cast and crew of a production are threatened by a psychopathic killer, but Stage Fright leans far more into the utter mayhem of being trapped in a restrictive environment with a prowling, seemingly supernatural predator. Still, one has to wonder how the two films may have rubbed off on one another through the involvement of the Argento protégé. It seems that of the two, he must have been more taken with American slasher stylings, because he applies them liberally here.

What kind of differentiation are we talking about? Well, for one thing, Stage Fright isn’t a mystery. Where most of the classic gialli featuring killers tend to involve solving the question of who exactly is wielding the straight razor, Stage Fright tells us about the guy right off the bat: He’s an escaped lunatic from a local mental institution, one who becomes infatuated with one of the production’s actresses after briefly seeing her. What is he to do, but follow her back to the theater where the crew is undergoing an all-night rehearsal, lock all the doors, and stalk each and every one of them? Nor does Stage Fright focus on investigators or police trying to hunt the killer down: It revolves around the victims, knowing that they’re being stalked, trying to find a way out of the theater that threatens to become their tomb as he hacks them apart in over-the-top fashion. This single location focus and large cast of nubile actor bodies–not to mention a masked killer, assuming the role of the production’s owl-headed villain–makes Stage Fright an American slasher in structure, through and through.

But at the same time, much of the styling of the film continues to reflect Soavi’s giallo training, working on films such as Tenebrae or A Blade in the Dark. To the American slasher geek, it gives Stage Fright a wonderfully exotic (and honestly quite kooky) visual language, exemplified in its opening moments during the ludicrous dress rehearsal of a stage musical involving prostitutes, street thugs and the owl-headed villain, dancing manically like he’s gearing up for the climactic audition of Flashdance. Above him, a woman in a blonde wig and Marilyn Monroe white dress wails on a saxophone from a balcony, as jets of wind ruffle her from all angles. Every element of it is ostentatious in the extreme, but it assures the viewer you’re in for a good time, long before the heads start rolling.

And once the killer does strike, Stage Fight never lets up. There are some lovely, absurd deaths on display, like the person who gets a pickaxe straight to the mouth, or the other victim who is somehow ripped in half by people pulling her arms and legs in opposite directions, in defiance of everything we know about the human anatomy. The excess is most certainly the draw, though the film can be oddly beautiful at times as well. Soavi shoots the increasingly silent theater with a dreamlike, ethereal layer of gauze to it, heightening the sense of surreality as the body count grows and the survivors dwindle. When only our Final Girl remains, the killer sits motionless among the stacked corpses of his victims gathered on center stage as feathers gently rain down like artificial snow and a stray cat gnaws on human entrails. It feels like a striking nightmare you’d have, note to yourself to hang onto, and then be unable to fully describe an hour later as it slips away back into the subconscious recesses of the mind.

Stage Fright was a somewhat strange film for its native market when it was released, but one that really could have been hailed as a slasher classic here in the U.S.–perhaps it even would have, if it had arrived a few years earlier, before the American market was beginning to grow tired of the increasingly franchise-bound genre. For whatever reason, it has never quite received its due, but those who cherish entries from the golden age of the slasher genre will want to expand their reach to give this striking Italian experiment the attention it has always deserved.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.

ABCs of Horror 3: “S” Is for Stage Fright (1987)