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?