Renato Polselli’s 1964 film The Monster of the Opera (Il mostro dell’opera) is a riotous vampire tale repurposing The Phantom of the Opera to an old abandoned theater in Italy, where an undead creature stalks the troupe’s leading lady, bringing the entire company into a battle with his ancient curse.

The story is overall rather lean, following familiar beats between the Phantom and vampire lore: the theater company noticing strange happenings around them; the monster’s obsession with leading lady Julia, a modern reincarnation of his lost love Laura; and her transfixion under his mysterious spell, lured to his lair filled with his other vampire brides.

But the story, and plot intricacies of the vampire’s curse and how to stop him, are secondary to this the characters’ fun personalities and the film’s take on the theater as bridging across time, an eternal life. The cast of characters are archetypal, occasionally conflicting, personality types across a wide spectrum, from the cold, demure leading lady, to the shyer background dancers, to the suave, dashing company director. Their light bickering and gentle jabs at one another add an ongoing comedic layer and spiky personality to a familiar story.

As theater performers, specifically dancers, their craft becomes a kinetic medium of storytelling in itself, establishing a norm then its deviation within our setting. When the company first arrives at the dusty old theater, the director asks them to get to work and start cleaning; which they do, stepping and moving in synchronized rhythm, the women wielding buckets and men twirling with broomsticks. It’s an impossible feat, performing in unison spontaneously upon being instructed to tidy up, as a scene both comic for its absurdism as well as a heightened expression of the group’s unity: being able to improvise, in sync, to a rhythm innate to their very being.

Similarly, that rhythm gets severely off-beat after the monster’s attacks begin; his curse underway, the dancers are spun into a frenzy, forced to keep dancing, lest his curse overtake them. If they step off the stage and go downstairs, they will be lost to his will. As this unseen force tries to pull them down, they shriek and try to stay dancing, manically, to avoid his power. Like a collective spin on The Red Shoes, they must keep dancing for their lives.

Another layer around performance and theater is the bridging together of different time periods, literally under one roof. The theater itself seems to be hundreds of years old, and long since abandoned, haunted by a figure who lived long ago and, since then, has accumulated a set of vampire brides. In the present, the youthful theater troupe plays the part of different eras, at one point dressed in classical Roman attire, and in rehearsal perform Cyrano, re-enacting the Middle Ages, but the contemporary world contrasts each of these distinct eras, performed through mid-century jazz music and modern dance. As actors, they are re-living the past through the modes of the present, an act also embodied by Julia, herself a contemporary reincarnation of the monster’s lost love.

The Monster of the Opera isn’t a particularly scary film, but its fun characters and kineticism through theater and dance make this a memorable, however lean, Italian horror entry.