15 Great Italian Horror Films You Must See Before You Die

8. StageFright: Aquarius (Michele Soavi, 1987)

“You know that people have a morbid curiosity about murder.”

Ignore those niggling little plot inconsistencies and irrational character decisions; don’t over-analyse the story, and you’ll have an absolute blast with Soavi’s unconventional slasher film, StageFright. While at first glance StageFright looks like a standard American inspired stalk-and-slash flick, to write it off as such would do the film a huge disservice. It's a very self-aware slasher movie, with glimmers of what we would later see in the likes of Scream. The murders, which are carried out by an escaped lunatic in an owl mask, are gratuitous and entirely over-the-top; yet the dismembered bodies of the butchered dance company are arranged on the stage like a piece of art.

While admittedly there might not be that much going on with the story, Soavi’s unique style more than makes up for it. The film is also far more suspenseful than a lot of the American slasher movies it tries to imitate. The big chase in the final act, in particular, is reason enough not to cast StageFright aside as simply another cheap, by-the-numbers slasher movie.