NECROPOLIS

Frankenstein’s monster, Countess Bathory, Attila the Hun, Montezuma, the Devil, witches and other ghosts of history and literature drift through Franco Brocani’s extraordinary NECROPOLIS, a plotless procession of tableaux, monologues and mysterious rituals set somewhere between a ruined civilization and the creative subconscious.

Characters emerge from darkness, deliver delirious confessions and disappear again into a psychedelic labyrinth of bare stages, Pop Art debris and shifting identities. Warhol superstar Viva becomes Bathory, Carmelo Bene plays the Devil, Tina Aumont appears as a witch, and Pierre Clémenti rides naked through the void on a white horse as Attila the Hun, while conversations wander through sex and revolution, religion and magic, madness and death to Gavin Bryars’ hypnotic minimalist score.

Nothing like a conventional horror film but not playing by the rules of any underground cinema either, NECROPOLIS is a strange collision of European avant-garde, theater, performance art and late-’60s counterculture—a lysergic pageant of the monsters, myths and bad dreams left behind by Western civilization.

“I cannot believe I just watched a gorgeous, enigmatic, glacially-paced arthouse film in which Frankenstein’s monster listens to the MC5 while wearing a green velvet suit. How did Franco Brocani know 50 years ago that such a thing was exactly what I needed tonight? Movies are fucking magic.” - Ipsissimu Mocata