ABCs of Horror 3: “O” Is for Opera (1987)

Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?

The career of Dario Argento pretty closely follows the trajectory of the genre with which he is most indelibly associated: Giallo. Although the maestro of blood and prog rock made several forays into the realm of supernatural horror films, most notably in the stretch between 1977-1985 that contains Suspiria, Inferno and Phenomena, giallo is really his home base, his fallback, the place where he both began and (potentially) ended his tenure behind the camera. His directorial debut, 1970’s The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, helped to codify many of the unique stylistic flourishes that would become inextricably associated with both the genre and Argento’s own lushly decadent visual style, while his most recent film, 2022’s Dark Glasses, continued to cling to whatever vestiges of that old magic still exist in the current day, more than half a century later.

1987’s Opera, on the other hand, falls neatly in between, straddling a line that many horror geeks and giallo devotees would roughly define as the end of an era. As a genre, giallo had been birthed by the early crime/psychological thrillers of Mario Bava in the 1960s, hit its creative and commercial peak of saturation in the 1970s, and was in pretty serious decline in the 1980s by the time Argento gifted us with one of his most sumptuously shot entries. Opera is a strange beast, a visually iconoclastic story of serial murder and stalking that is utterly obsessed with the act of observing and watching, itself a common giallo component. So many of these films open with a character–often a man who is an outsider in the community–witnessing a terrible crime, and then being entangled in it. That’s certainly a fitting description of the likes of The Bird With the Crystal Plumage or Deep Red, but Opera elevates the whole voyeurism thing to an entirely different plane. Practically every shot feels like it’s peeping at the characters, who are likewise constantly observing–or being forced to observe–terrible acts being carried out. It’s a battle between the compulsion and the shame of voyeurism, wrapped up in a story about folks being murdered in an Italian opera house.

Because Opera isn’t just a giallo or quasi-slasher, it’s also a behind-the-scenes drama about the fractious, squabbling cast of a big-budget, avant-garde reimagining of Macbeth, with prescient styling one still wouldn’t be surprised to see brought to the stage today in service of dressing up the staid works of The Bard. Our protagonist is Betty (Cristina Marsillach), a full-throated ingénue serving as the understudy for the role of Lady Macbeth, who is thrust into making her premiere following a suspicious injury to the production’s intended leading lady. But can she survive the curse of the so-called Scottish Play, when people around the production start dropping dead?

If that calls to mind Phantom of the Opera, one could hardly be surprised. Like Christine Daaé, Betty is talented but held back by seniority and the political maneuvering of the professional performance circuit, a delicate creature seemingly unsuited to a cutthroat profession demanding that she make her own opportunities. Indeed, the crew of her Macbeth performance practically have to beg her to step into the role when tragedy befalls just a few days before the premiere, so concerned is she about the apparent supernatural affront of disturbing the miasma surrounding Macbeth. Of course, her trepidation turns out to be entirely warranted. Oddly enough, Argento would actually go on to direct an ill-received 1998 version of Phantom as well.

A decade earlier, though, Dario is still at the height of his powers, filling the screen of Opera with stunning imagery. His deep focus techniques show off the richly detailed, expressionistic sets of this Macbeth production at the 160-year-old Teatro Regio di Parma, buffeted by the beating wings and incessant caw caw of a noisy flock of ravens kept on hand to boost the macabre bonafides of the production. It’s against this backdrop that Betty is repeatedly assaulted, captured and bound by the killer, who wishes not to kill her but to make her watch other atrocities being committed–with a unique method to force compliance. In order to be sure that Betty can’t simply close her eyes to avoid witnessing the killer’s murders, he tapes thin strips of adhesive below each one, with rows of upward-pointing needles that will pierce her eyes if she dares to shut them. One imagines that Argento must have looked at this image–the helplessly bound Betty desperately trying not to blink, her eyes signaling panic and madness–and known that it would be not just the signature visual of Opera, but one of the great shots of his career. The combination of the needles and Marsillach’s pleading eyes, slowly dripping blood, is both evocative and unforgettable.

There are other moments in Opera that are equally searing, like a throat being cut open to retrieve a swallowed bracelet, or a bullet being shot through the narrow shaft of a door peephole and exploding out of the head of someone on the other side, but you would expect nothing less from a man who for several decades reliably conjured up hideous deaths for so many of his characters. As that kind of blood-and-guts, relentlessly stylized giallo, Opera is among the strongest of his career. Where it’s not so strong, on the other hand, is as a murder mystery, given that the eventual killer is revealed as more or less the only person it possibly could be, if you had any awareness at all of what Roger Ebert referred to as the “Law of Economy of Characters.” Like the version of Macbeth being presented, there’s a potential argument for style-over-substance to be made here.

Still, the arrestingly beautiful, downright intoxicating aura of Opera is difficult to dismiss. One wonders if some credit might actually be due to second unit director Michael Soavi as well–the very same year, 1987, he directed the oddly similar Stage Fright, a more overt Italian slasher film that is also set backstage during a musical in rehearsal. Was Argento observing, like so many of the peering eyes of Opera, or perhaps the other way round? Either way, the exchange of voyeuristic ideas seems to have worked out for the best.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.