everybody go watch paganini horror (1989) on tubi right now or i swear to god
Okay, originally I had this big, long, sanctimonious intro written out about how no, I haven’t seen XYZ Prestige Television Program, because I have Tubi at my disposal, so why would I want to watch Yellowjackets when I could watch Chopping Mall, and what could I possibly get out of The White Lotus that I can’t get from The Old Dark House, etc. But like, who cares? I don’t! I only care about one thing, and it’s Paganini Horror.
Paganini Horror is a low-budget Italian horror film directed by frequent Dario Argento collaborator Luigi Cozzi, based on a rumor that Romantic-era composer and violinist Niccolò Paganini sold his soul to the devil in exchange for fame and fortune. I believe it. But instead of just making a film about that, Cozzi had a much bolder vision. Suppose modern artists seeking fame and fortune followed in Paganini’s footsteps and sold their own souls to the devil. This is the story of [band name not found. They did not give this band a name. They forgot.]
Once upon a time, in a creepy Venetian mansion, Niccolò Paganini made a deal with the devil a ten-year-old aspiring violinist practiced Paganini’s “Le Streghe” and then casually murdered her mother by tossing a hairdryer into her bath. Luigi Cozzi decided you get one vitally important, tone-setting flashback, lest the film exceed its inexcusably bloated 83-minute runtime, and The Devil Went Down to Venice didn’t make the cut.
The second this woman is dead, we are jolted to a recording studio in the ’80s, where [band name not found] is rehearsing their upcoming single, “Stay the Night.” It’s kind of a banger. Definitely could’ve hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on November 29th, 1986. If it existed.
“It’s a complete waste of time,” grumbles producer Lavinia. “There’s nothing original about it.”
She calls Kate, the lead singer, in for a chat, and Kate is all, “WHAT IS IT THIS TIME, LAVINIA?” as though she didn’t just perform one of the most egregious ripoffs that I — a person whose favorite hobby is being pedantic about egregious ripoffs — have ever heard in my entire life. Then she inexplicably says, “I know, it’s the violin!” There is no violin in this song. There is no violin playing shown on screen. “But it’s essential to the sound,” she continues, so I guess we’re supposed to pretend there was violin? I don’t know, Lavinia, I think it could work.
Lavinia tells Kate her song sucks and she’d “rather not even record the thing.” Yeah, they certainly are expending a lot of effort on something that’s just going to result in an instant lawsuit from one John Bongiovi, Jr. Kate says she can’t write a better song, and Lavinia suggests she find someone who can, at which point the camera cuts to Daniel, the band’s drummer, listening intently.
The very next scene is Daniel (sporting an epic Canadian tuxedo) taking a boat to a sketchy abandoned shipyard to meet with the guy from Halloween, dubbed by an Alfred Hitchcock impersonator, named Mr. Pickett. Daniel gives him a duffel bag of cash in exchange for a locked briefcase, the combination to which is 666. Inside is a wax-sealed, unreleased Paganini original.
An undisclosed duration of time later, the band is back at the studio, and Daniel is playing his piano transposition of the piece, titled “Paganini Horror.” He must be some kind of musical genius, because I cannot fathom how any iteration of this thing would ever have sounded good on violin. It kind of reminds me of the “Layla” coda, but “Stay the Night” buried the bar for creativity about twelve meters underground and “Paganini Horror” is technically just a demo, so I’ll give him a pass. I’m sure the finished product will be totally unique and engender zero plagiarism accusations. “This is the song for Kate,” Daniel says through his serial killer grin. “Do you like it?”
“We should be able to come up with a winner out of that,” Lavinia burns him.
Kate exposits the piece’s history — Paganini composed it for some vaguely occult means but never actually published it — and then exclaims, “No one has ever done anything remotely like it before! Except for Michael Jackson, with ‘Thriller.’”
“We could do the same!” adds Daniel.
Lavinia sees dollar signs and abandons her principles re: originality. She wants to hire “Mark Singer — the director, the king of horror!” (I’m glad someone temporarily managed to dethrone that Stephen guy) and film a music video in an abandoned house.
Kate knows just the place. “I know just the place! La Casa de Soul, the House of the Key of G, where musicians and composers lived many centuries ago.”
And Lavinia conveniently knows Sylvia, the owner, who is a reasonable woman, she thinks. “That’s our house, my friends. The house of Kate’s video clip, of Paganini, and ghosts.”
(That’s not even my TV, that’s just what it looks like.)
Kate (wearing a wedding dress) wakes up in the house, which has been adorned with candelabras and fake spiderwebs and shattered mirrors, and looks awesome. Someone in a Paganini Halloween mask (I guess they make those) sneaks inside. “Who put this dress on me?” Kate demands as Paganini starts playing the violin. She follows the sound of the music to what I assume was the dining room, but the only furnishings are a shitload of candles and a coffin. And atop the coffin are three of the most amazing props I’ve ever seen in any movie, period: a seemingly normal golden violin, (put a pin in that) a dagger with a handle shaped like a treble clef, and THE CONTRACT.
As Kate recoils in horror, Paganini busts out of the coffin and stabs her to death with the treble clef dagger. And then Mark Singer — the director, the king of horror — starts yelling at Paganini — Daniel in a mask — to angle the blade differently, because this was just the music video the whole time.
Behind him, Sylvia, the reasonable woman who owns the house, tells Lavinia how the real Paganini sold his soul to the devil in this very room, and then “killed his bride, Antonia, and used her intestines as strings for the violin that he played from then on.” I remember that episode of Hannibal.
Meanwhile, Mr. Pickett brings the duffel bag of cash up to the top of a bell tower, and proceeds to fling all of it into the wind, chanting as he does.
And as those little demons fly away, Mr. Pickett invokes Paganini’s curse. Now the band will pay for repeating his mistake! I think.
Kate changes out of the Christine dress so that Mark Singer — the director, the king of horror — can shoot them playing “Paganini Horror”, and oh no.
OH NO.
In Lavinia’s quest for originality, she totally failed to consider that another band could’ve gotten their hands on the piece first! Now [band name not found] is gonna get Paganini’d and sued!
Actually, hang on. This has staggering implications no matter your interpretation of events:
Interpretation #1: Mr. Pickett had two copies of the cursed Paganini piece, and he sold the first one to Jeff Lynne. But because ELO didn’t try to film the music video in Paganini’s actual house, the devil decided it didn’t count. Or maybe he agreed to cut them a break since they let him cameo in “Fire On High.”
Interpretation #2: Mr. Pickett sold Daniel a piano arrangement of “Twilight” and hoped he wouldn’t notice. The events that are about to unfold for [band name not found] are entirely the result of filming in a haunted house.
Interpretation #3: Satan granted Paganini the ability to travel through time, and he went straight to 1981 and ghostwrote “Twilight.”
Anyway, they wrap the performance, and Mark Singer — the director, the king of horror — says, “You are very, very, very, very, very great girls.” Anything you say five times is obviously true. He tells Lavinia he can’t finish the video today, and she freaks out because they’re way over budget. They’ve already wrapped the prologue and the actual performance though, so I have no idea what else he thinks he needs to film, and it’s not like he brought the necessary equipment to edit the video at the house. Nor would it make sense to do so, unless he’s method. Can directors be method?
Kate and her bandmates — guitarist Elena and bassist Rita — go upstairs to change. And by change, I mean Kate and Elena just throw some sweaters on and bounce, and Rita starts redoing her lipstick. It is at this point that the actual Niccolò Paganini appears in a cloud of smoke. Wearing the stupid Paganini costume they made for the video.
“Hey, Daniel, how come you came back up?” Rita asks.
“I am not Daniel,” he intones.
Remember that pin I asked you to put in the golden violin prop from earlier? You did put a pin in that, right?
He knifes Rita, and she screams, and no one hears this. Downstairs, they’re all searching for her, and Lavinia is pissed. She’s like, “MARK, REWRITE THE VIDEO TO ACCOUNT FOR RITA’S ABSENCE OR YOU’RE A HACK,” and he suggests using the mannequins that have been situated around the set, draped in tulle, the entire goddamn time.
The mannequins are Sylvia’s, and these aren’t even all of them; she has more in the other room. Daniel volunteers to go get them. As he’s heading up the stairs, Rita (now wearing a white dress) calls his name. He follows her, and she leads him to a scary blue room with an hourglass and a framed picture of Einstein on the wall. The hourglass begins to glow red, and as he inspects it, Paganini sneaks up and gets him with the violin switchblade.
Again, no one hears him get murdered, even though he screams his fucking head off. In the very next shot they’re all outside, shouting his and Rita’s names into the ether.
Elena theorizes that Rita and Daniel have run off together, and as they argue about this, Sylvia calls them all back inside. She has something to show them! And I have something to show you! It’s my favorite exchange in the whole movie!
Kate: What a strange light coming from over there.
Lavinia: It’s more than strange, it’s weird!
Sylvia: Yes. I can’t explain it. Anyway, let me show you what I discovered in the strange room.
Paganini Horror drinking game: Take a shot every time someone uses the word strange. You will be stone-cold sober for the first 40 minutes of an 80-minute movie, and then abruptly get plastered. I mean, it’s ideal.
Anyway, let me tell you what Sylvia discovered in the strange room: it’s the ring Daniel was wearing, in a human-shaped pile of smoldering ash. Mark Singer — the director, the king of horror — is skeptical. He expresses this by Shatnering his next few lines. “Daniel’s! Playing! A joke! On us! A man doesn’t. Turn into a. Pile of ashes! In a matter of minutes! Not even. If the devil himself suddenly popped up. Out of the ground!” And then Kate falls through a hole in the ground.
Mark Singer — the director, the king of horror — tries to pull her out, but his hand gets fried. Then this happens.
The gang has a bad trip that culminates in an exterior shot of the House of the Key of G literally rotating 360 degrees vertically. Lavinia doesn’t want to leave without Kate, but Elena disagrees, so she grabs Mark Singer — the director, the king of horror — and they flee the strange room. They get into a car and start driving away, but the car hits an electrical field and explodes, ejecting Elena to safety and killing Mark Singer — the director, the king of horror. Thank God. I was getting so tired of copy+pasting his full appellation.
Elena, Lavinia, and Sylvia are outside pondering this when they hear Kate scream and tiptoe back into the house. “The light’s changed,” Sylvia says of the strange room. “It seems more normal now.”
They can’t see down the hole, so Lavinia goes to look for a flashlight, and Elena begins philosophizing.
Elena asks if anything like this has ever happened before, and Sylvia’s like, “NO, ABSOLUTELY NOT, NEVER.” Lavinia returns with a flashlight and decides to climb down into the hole, as though they didn’t all just watch it zap Mar– that guy’s hand. And like, the band has spent this whole movie dunking on Lavinia for being the worst producer ever because she didn’t want to record their Bon Jovi knockoff, but she’s willing to crawl down a scary hole to save Kate, so I think maybe they’ve been a little harsh?
As soon as Lavinia crawls out of hearing range, Kate screams again from somewhere else in the house. Sylvia goes to investigate, and Elena notices a horrible, festering wound on her arm that I WILL NOT show you, because I value your eyeballs.
Sylvia hears the cursed violin piece playing in another room, and follows it all the way up to the attic. Out the window, she sees Daniel walking across the yard. She runs outside and does not find Daniel, but she does find Kate lying at the bottom of the drained pool with no recollection of how she got there! Meanwhile, Lavinia climbs out of the hole, and the strange room is red now. She reunites with Sylvia and Kate, and they realize Elena is missing.
A trail of “blood… mixed with something else” leads them upstairs to find Elena, whose arm wound has spread, COMPLETELY ZOMBIFYING her. She wheezes helplessly at them for a few seconds before succumbing to her infection. “Who could have got her to look like this?” asks Kate. Who indeed?
“I think I know,” Lavinia whispers. “This mold… I’ve seen it before.”
“Where?”
“It’s a special fungus… that they discovered… in the eighteenth century… on logs… that were floated… along certain European rivers. Wood that was used to make the most precious violins. Stradivarius.”
Kate is instantly on board with this theory. She’s like, “Oh my God, the Stradivarius fungus, of course! Why didn’t I think of that?”
Sylvia, however, is not convinced. “What does it have to do with what killed Elena?”
Lavinia doesn’t know. “But this is the fungus for sure,” she says.
No joke, I have been thinking about the Stradivarius fungus nonstop for almost two weeks now. It is the funniest way anyone has ever died in cinematic history, including the entire Final Destination franchise and Trina from Ginger Snaps.
“A wood fungus can’t attack a person just like that!” Sylvia insists. “When I left her, she was all right.”
“This house was normal when we first arrived,” Lavinia retorts.
Kate thinks she knows how to break the curse. “It sounds like a crazy idea,” she admits.
They brought Paganini into the house with ELO’s Daniel’s music, so they have to use it as a weapon to send him to hell. “I’m convinced there’s some secret behind all this — something that winds it all up. It’s something like a mathematical problem. A formula which binds the monster to our world.”
So Kate plays the cursed song on the switchblade violin, and they go outside to see if the force field is still up. Kate reaches her arm out… and gets electrocuted. Paganini has not gone to hell.
New plan! Kate’s going to play the music backwards. “It’s the only way we have to get Paganini and his fuckin’ music out of here!”
Lavinia holds up the sheet music for Kate to read, but a gust of wind blows it away and it catches fire. When Lavinia tries to retrieve it, she’s crushed to death by an invisible wall, splattering the music with her blood. Someone knocks Kate out with the violin. And then!
Paganini pursues Sylvia with the violin blade, and one can only infer she meets the same end as Rita. Sometime later, Paganini stuffs Kate’s body in a double bass case like it’s a tomb, and serenades her. She wakes up just as the case catches on fire, and it’s not looking good for our heroine until the clock strikes 7:00 A.M. and the sun begins to rise.
The violin bursts into flames. Paganini roars in pain and dissolves into a perfectly treble clef-shaped ash pile.
The latch on the case breaks, and Kate stumbles out. She picks up the violin remnants, smashes them into the pile of treble clef ash, and runs outside into the — at last — normal color grading. A car pulls up and Sylvia, alive in a red dress emerges. She’s all, “You didn’t play the music backwards, dumbass,” and then Mr. Pickett also gets out of the car, all, “Please allow me to introduce myself; I’m a man of wealth and taste.” They reveal that Sylvia was the hairdryer bath murder child from the prologue, which took place in this very house. “The night you just lived,” she tells Kate, “was the night he punished me for my horrible crime.” And now she has to relive the experience every night, with new damned souls each time.
“The people who come here have already been condemned,” says Mr. Pickett, which I think would hit a lot harder if this band had committed crimes more serious than plagiarizing Bon Jovi. But I guess that’s all it takes! Boys Like Girls is so next.
Then a standard horror movie family pulls up in another car to live out the Oops! We Bought A Haunted House! plot. I was hoping they were also here to record a Paganini cover, (and more importantly, to confirm my theory that Mr. Pickett has infinite copies of the piece, one of which he sold to ELO) but alas. Mr. Pickett muses that even though this family sucks shit and deserves to get Paganini’d, the daughter is innocent. “We might consider sparing her.”
“You mean you kill the people who come in this house for punishment?” exclaims Kate. Uh yeah, dude, what do you think just happened to your friends? She extrapolates that since she’s alive, she must be the token non-damned member of the gang and can leave, per Final Girl conventions. So Mr. Pickett takes the treble clef dagger out of his briefcase and unceremoniously shanks her.
And over the ominous strains of violin, Sylvia leads the doomed family into the House of G.
So that’s Paganini Horror, or Reason #528 Why I Haven’t Seen [Your Favorite Hulu Original]. Reason #529 is the movie’s Wikipedia page, which is a pretty fascinating read. Apparently, nobody liked how this thing turned out. Except me. I like how this thing turned out so much. (My favorite part is that Luigi Cozzi edited the script so many times that it drove the producer not only away from the project, but out of the film industry entirely. Goals.) And you can watch this masterpiece for free on Tubi, the only streaming platform you will ever need. Or at least, the only one for which I am willing to shill. Unless they ever take Paganini Horror down, of course. Then I’m going straight to that bell tower and invoking the curse.
