Necropolis

• Directed by Franco Brocani, an Italian underground filmmaker working in the pop-art, Warhol-adjacent wing of post-1968 Italian experimental cinema.
• The cast is a who's-who of European art-house cult figures: Pierre Clémenti as Attila the Hun, Viva (an Andy Warhol Factory regular) as Countess Bathory, Carmelo Bene as the Devil, and Bruno Corazzari as Frankenstein's Monster, alongside Tina Aumont and Nicoletta Machiavelli.
• The score was written by Gavin Bryars, early in a career that would later produce the minimalist classic 'Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet.'
• There's no conventional story — the film is built from monologues delivered by iconic damned and mythic figures, including Frankenstein's monster, King Kong, and even a personified Mona Lisa.
• Visually the film leans on painter Mario Schifano's pop-art color palette and Warhol Factory-style improvisation rather than traditional horror craft.
• An Italy-UK co-production produced by Gianni Barcelloni and Alan Power, it never found a mainstream audience and has mostly circulated as an obscure cult title, later resurfacing through specialty labels and rare-film archives for collectors.

The four monsters aren't random — Attila, Bathory, Frankenstein's Monster, and the Devil stand in for imperial conquest, aristocratic cruelty, science run amok, and pure nihilism. Restaging them as a pop-art performance piece argues that the countercultural 'new' Rome of 1969 is just history's old monsters wearing new clothes.

The American tourist hunting a missing Mona Lisa is the film's real punchline: he's searching a monster-haunted, decaying Rome for an icon of high culture that's already gone, while the Devil watches. The joke is that by the time the counterculture finished cannibalizing history for aesthetic material, the thing being toured for wasn't there anymore.

Because it trades plot for a parade of monologuing icons, some read Necropolis less as horror than as a filmed art installation — a Warhol Factory screen test rerouted through Roman myth and Catholic guilt instead of New York pop culture.

Franco Brocani's Necropolis throws out conventional plot for a procession of history's damned. Pierre Clémenti rides through as Attila the Hun, Viva (of Andy Warhol's Factory) holds court as the "Blood Countess" Elizabeth Bathory, Bruno Corazzari's Frankenstein's Monster wanders the ruins, and Carmelo Bene presides as the Devil himself — while an American tourist (Louis Waldon) drifts through Rome hunting for a missing Mona Lisa. Built from monologues rather than scenes, the film stitches these mythic and historical monsters into what one critic called "an apocalyptic view of our culture, where ideology, religion and love are definitely dead." Shot through with the pop-art color sense of painter Mario Schifano and the improvisational spirit of Warhol's Factory, it's less a horror movie than an underground art happening staged with history's worst people.