Stage Fright

A cast rehearsing a musical about a killer are locked into the theatre overnight when a real escaped murderer, who has put on the show's owl-head costume, gets inside with them.

Soavi had been Argento's assistant and this is a distillation of everything he learned: the killer is a truly eerie image, a man in an enormous feathered owl mask, and the theatrical setting lets Soavi stage the killings as performances under stage lighting.

The central image, the owl-headed killer sitting among the arranged bodies on the stage as feathers drift down, is one of the great compositions in Italian horror.

It came right at the end of the cycle, when almost nobody was making these well any more, and it is proof the form still had one good film left in it.

Also known as Aquarius and Deliria.