An anthropological report disguised as a farce, a grotesque fresco painted with vitriol instead of oil paints. In 1963, Dino Risi did not simply shoot a film in episodes, but assembled a human bestiary whose ferocity lies precisely in its chilling normality. The Monsters is not a horror film in the Gothic sense of the term; its protagonists are not vampires or werewolves, but the man next door, the respected professional, the family man. The monstrosity Risi puts on display is endemic, consubstantial with the human being, captured at the exact moment the Italian Economic Miracle promised a material well-being inversely proportional to the nation's ethical fortitude. The title itself is a brilliant provocation: The Monsters, with the definite article indicating not a specific group, but the totality, the species. It is us, all of us, potentially.

The fragmentary structure, which at the time might have seemed a concession to the commercial formula of the omnibus film, is in fact the aesthetic and conceptual keystone of the work. Risi does not offer us a novel, but a collection of dark tales that echo a postmodern and disenchanted Boccaccio. Each episode is a wild shard that pierces a different aspect of the social body: family, justice, politics, culture, religion. There is no narrative thread holding them together, other than the director's merciless gaze and the protean mimesis of its two virtuosos, Vittorio Gassman and Ugo Tognazzi. If Hieronymus Bosch had made films in boom-era Italy, he probably would have created something very similar: a single, vast canvas teeming with sinners, each trapped in their own small, ridiculous personal hell. The fragmentation reflects the disintegration of a cohesive social fabric, the loss of a moral center.

Take the episode that frames the film, "Sentimental Education." A father (Tognazzi) teaches his young son not the values of rectitude, but the techniques of swindling, of cynicism, of survival at all costs. It is Flaubert in reverse, a bildungsroman of dishonesty. The final smile of the child, who has learned his lesson by surpassing the master, is one of the most chilling endings in the history of Italian cinema. There is no explicit condemnation, only the observation of a self-perpetuating cycle. Monstrosity is not an aberration, but an inheritance. In this, Risi anticipates Hannah Arendt's thesis on the "banality of evil": the monster is not a Nietzschean superman who chooses evil with Luciferian grandeur, but a mediocre functionary of corruption who acts out of conformism, for a quiet life, to "get by."

Gassman and Tognazzi are two sides of the same coin, two interchangeable masks of the human comedy. Their ability to transfigure themselves, to shift from a sordid boxing promoter to a mellifluous politician, from a cowardly soldier to a pathetic seducer, is not mere actorly virtuosity. It is the physical representation of the film's thesis: the monster has not one face, but a thousand. They are the incarnation of a society in which appearance—the "bella figura"—has devoured substance. Their acting is a flaying. In "The Noble Art," Gassman, made up to be unrecognizable, is a boxing manager who embodies the cruelty of capital exploiting the proletarian body down to the last drop of blood. His grotesque mask looks as if it has stepped out of an etching from Goya's Caprichos, where "the sleep of reason produces monsters." And here, reason is sleeping, anesthetized by incipient prosperity and rampant individualism. The sequence of the punch-drunk boxer, almost a Pasolinian Christ of the peripheries, being pushed back into the ring for one last, fatal bout, is pure tragedy masked as black comedy.

The film is an encyclopedia of moral squalor. In the episode "The Eyewitness," an everyman (Tognazzi) witnesses a murder and tries to do his civic duty, but is crushed by a bureaucratic and police machinery that is more Kafkaesque than the nightmare itself. His transformation from model citizen to persecuted paranoid, forced to recant to save his own skin, is a powerful metaphor for the omertà and cowardice that undermine the foundations of any civil society. The system does not protect the honest man, but expels him like a foreign body. In this, The Monsters proves prophetic, anticipating decades of Italian news. Risi uses the lens of comedy to dissect mechanisms that are, in essence, tragic. The laughter it provokes is always bitter, the kind that catches in your throat when you realize you're laughing at yourself.

Even when humor seems to prevail, as in the famous episode of the two blind beggars ("The Two Orphans"), the satire is merciless. Tognazzi and Gassman, in an almost Chaplinesque performance, orchestrate a perfect pantomime, but their aim is to deceive others, to exploit pity for profit. It is an updated and even more cynical version of the Cat and the Fox from Collodi. The world of the film is a universe without innocence, where even charity is a commercial transaction.

Placed in its historical context, The Monsters is the acidic and disillusioned response to the Neorealist optimism of the preceding decade. If De Sica and Rossellini had sought dignity and hope among the rubble of the post-war period, Risi, Scola, and Monicelli—the great masters of the Commedia all'italiana—found moral emptiness and hypocrisy amidst the new apartment blocks and gleaming automobiles of the boom. It is the X-ray of an anthropological mutation, as Pasolini would define it a few years later. The "monsters" are the new Italians, modern, unscrupulous, freed from the constraints of tradition but incapable of creating a new ethical code for themselves beyond that of personal gain. The stark, almost documentary-like black-and-white cinematography by Alfio Contini is not a random aesthetic choice, but a functional one: it strips reality of all chromatic embellishment, presenting it in its skeletal essence, like an X-ray revealing the disease beneath healthy-looking skin.

To watch it again today is to perform an almost archaeological dig on a past that, ominously, never passes. The power dynamics, the petty corruption, the amoral familism, the intellectual vanity ("The Muse"), the arrogance of political power ("The Politician's Day"): everything resonates with a disturbing relevance. The Monsters is a classic not because it captures an era, but because it transcends that era to speak of universal and perennial human vices. It is a canonical work of cinema because it had the courage to look its own present in the face and reflect back an image that was distorted yet true, like one of those funhouse mirrors that alters proportions but reveals a hidden truth. It is a film that offers neither consolation nor catharsis, only the awareness that the most frightening monster is the one we might recognize, when the credits roll, in our own reflection.