Anthony Head

Opera With Heart (Also Spleen, Liver and Entrails)

IN the “Saw” horror movies that he has worked on, Darren Lynn Bousman has unflinchingly subjected his characters to excruciating tortures. He has burned them alive, frozen them to death and crushed their skulls in spiky, Venus flytraplike headgear. But what really turns his stomach are movie musicals.

“Anything that breaks into song, where they’re talking, talking, talking, and then there’s a big show number,” Mr. Bousman said, “that I can’t handle.”

But after writing the screenplay that became “Saw II” ($87 million at the domestic box office in 2005) and directing that film as well as the franchise’s third and fourth installments (which earned $80 millionand $63 million, respectively), Mr. Bousman, 29, decided his next movie would be a rock opera.

Not a musical. “There’s a big, distinct difference,” he said.

There is also a deep, blood-soaked, entrail-clogged difference between Mr. Bousman’s new movie, “Repo! The Genetic Opera,” and other musical dramas.

In fairness, “Repo,” which opened Friday, adheres to several conventions of the operatic form: a sung libretto instead of spoken dialogue; a chorus, of sorts, commenting on its themes of love, loyalty and class warfare; even a denouement that takes place in an opera-within-an-opera.

It also happens to be about a doctor employed by a futuristic biotechnology company to repossess bodily organs from still-living customers who haven’t paid their bills.

“People are tired of seeing the same thing over and over again,” Mr. Bousman said. “Here’s a movie that kind of defies description of what you can compare it to.”

“Repo!” was the creation of Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich, a pair of Southern Californians who met in an acting class in the late 1990s. Together they began performing what they called 10-minute musicals at rock clubs around Los Angeles, in which Mr. Smith, now 45, would play many of the instruments and Mr. Zdunich, 32, would perform many of the roles.

Among their most popular works was an abbreviated rock opera called “The Necromerchant’s Debt,” about a grave robber who comments on society’s underbelly through its characters, such as a man who repossesses organs for a living. The piece appealed to Mr. Zdunich’s affinity for macabre entertainments in the Grand Guignol tradition and to Mr. Smith’s former career as a lawyer. “I’d see a lot of people basically getting things repossessed, and a lot of people with credit problems,” Mr. Smith said. “From that I thought: What if we were in the future?”

In 2002 Mr. Smith and Mr. Zdunich decided to stage an expanded, full-length version of the opera, now known as “Repo!,” at a proper theater in Los Angeles. As they searched for a director, they were introduced to Mr. Bousman, then 23, who had no professional directing experience but plenty of enthusiasm.

“He came and told us right off the bat, ‘I was born to direct this musical,’ ” Mr. Smith recalled. “And Terrance and I are thinking we’ve heard this stuff before.” But further conversations with Mr. Bousman changed their minds. “He talked about staging fake repossessions on the street in front of the theater,” Mr. Smith said. “We were immediately like, ‘This is cool.’ ”

Mr. Bousman directed that incarnation of “Repo!,” which played at the John Raitt Theater (since renamed the Paul Gleason Theater), later selling the screenplay that would become “Saw II,” while Mr. Zdunich and Mr. Smith continued to refine and restage the show.

But as Mr. Bousman’s filmmaking career began to take off, he was frustrated in his attempts to turn the opera into a motion picture. After the success of “Saw II,” Mr. Bousman said: “Producers came to me and said, ‘Darren, what’s the next movie you want to do?’ And I said, ‘Repo!’ And they said, ‘Absolutely not.’ ”

In 2006, after Mr. Bousman finished work on “Saw III,” he recruited several members of that film’s cast and crew to produce a short concept film based on two songs from “Repo!” After inviting agents and producers to watch the 10-minute reel at the offices of the Endeavor Agency in Beverly Hills, Mr. Bousman sold the concept to Mark Burg, a producer of the “Saw” franchise.

Even with a green light, Mr. Bousman found it challenging to recruit the stars he wanted. Some cast members, like the British soprano Sarah Brightman, turned out to be unexpected aficionados of the “Saw” movies. “I’ve always been a fan of cleverly put-together horror movies,” said Ms. Brightman, who plays Blind Mag, an opera diva with mechanical eyes. “They’re thought through properly. They’re not just gore for the sake of gore.”

Alexa Vega, who plays Shilo, the invalid daughter of the organ-repo man, required more persuading. When Mr. Bousman contacted her through her MySpace account, flaunting his “Saw” credentials, she asked her sister Makenzie for her advice; Makenzie, who appeared in the original “Saw” movie, had never heard of him.

“I’m thinking: Oh my gosh, this guy’s not only crazy, he’s also a liar,” said Alexa Vega, who appeared in all three “Spy Kids” movies. “It turns out he was telling the truth.”

What united the eclectic cast — which also includes Paul Sorvino as a dying biotech magnate and Paris Hilton as one of his spoiled scions — was a willingness to follow Mr. Bousman down whatever dark paths “Repo!” might lead him.

For one scene Anthony Stewart Head, who plays the organ-repo man, was asked to perform a vivisection on a delinquent debtor while tap-dancing — then use his victim’s excavated corpse as a ventriloquist’s dummy in a ghoulish duet.

He accepted the assignment without much hesitation. “The bottom line is, it’s not every day you get to disembowel somebody and sing about it,” said Mr. Head, who has previously starred on the television series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and in a 1990 stage revival of “The Rocky Horror Show.” The only problem with the scene, Mr. Head said, was “once I started getting in and pulling bits out, they were very slippery, and I dropped a couple of them.” Mr. Bousman’s “Saw” movies have been condemned for their graphic violence, but he said “Repo!” should avoid such complaints. “Yes, it’s violent, but it’s violent in a mischievous, comic sense, not in a gore-out violent sense,” he said.

Mr. Bousman does not expect that “Repo!” (which he said was made for less than $10 million) will find favor with the mass audiences that made hits of the “Saw” movies. In its first weekend “Repo!” opened in just eight cities before commencing a road tour in which the movie will play in a different city every day — a far cry from the instant national release that the “Saw” features enjoyed. Instead the creators of “Repo!” have been pursuing grass-roots promotional efforts, showing the movie at horror- and fantasy-film festivals around the country and releasing its cast recording in September to familiarize audiences with its “Rocky Horror”-meets-Nine Inch Nails soundtrack.

At the Fantastic Fest in Austin, Tex., in September Mr. Zdunich reported that he was already being asked to take photographs with “Repo!” fans dressed like characters from the film. “They haven’t even seen the movie yet,” said Mr. Zdunich, who reprises his role as the grave robber in the film. “They’re just latching onto the idea of it.”

Ultimately, he said, it would take a certain gothic sensibility to fully appreciate the joys of “Repo!”

“I look at my MySpace requests every day,” Mr. Zdunich said, “and almost all of them, all their screen names are like Deadly Curse or Black Widow Spider. I think it’s going to be the black nail-polish crowd that’s going to really eat us up in the long run.”