Terror At The Opera (1987)

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Dir. Dario Argento

Italy

Terror At The Opera like actual music is about the vivid images that a song or piece of music generates for the listener even if they don’t make logical sense. Re-seeing the film, I realise that my coldness to the film originally was because it completely goes against the grain of what one expects with this sort of narrative. Since his beginning as a director, Dario Argento’s films have been curveballs which don’t go in unexpected directions – tangents in Deep Red (1975), the abrupt ending of Cat O’Nine Tails (1971), and Suspiria (1977) as a whole – long before the eighties and his more divisive films. They’re the same identical curveballs of his later, divisive films like The Card Player (2004) and Giallo (2009), with only the material around them up to debate. Even The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970), kicking off the giallo genre, has unexpected directions, the kind that would be dismissed as bad screenwriting to some, but are the dreamlike and abstract tones people adore his films, and Italian genre cinema, for. Viewing Opera, without bringing up the music choices, raises attention to an age old question – do we view cinema through the lense of theatre and novels, needing a full narrative, or do visuals and juxtapositions of everything there (visually, audibly, tonally) mean more?

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An understudy becomes the lead in a major operatic performance, only to be the victim of a killer who forces her to watch them murder people close to her. The film does not follow convention. It is various fragments connected into one sum – horror, voyeurism and pleasure, theatricality and the questioning of the protagonist’s state of mind all together in a loose story. It is intoxicated by its aesthetic and cinematic style, an exceptional creation which contains elaborate camera movements and clever use of what we the viewer can and cannot see. It is not mere aesthetic fetishism however, as it is clear, despite the problems he had making the film, that Argento is making the structure purposeful. It is clear we are not that separate from his supernatural films viewing Opera, within the same tone of Suspiria and Inferno (1980). The best of Italian cinema, including auteurs like Federico Fellini, work on a logic of waking dreams and everything connected to them – bright, deep textures and colours, fetishes, sexuality and power, individuals as representations – and you could view it as a cop-out to defend the apparent plot discrepancies, but when compared to awful abstract films from Italy (like Luigi Cozzi’s Demons 6 – De Profundis (1989) which attempted to be a film in Argento’s cinematic world), this seems more purposeful. If so, what does this mean? As a horror film, it is meant to terrify or unsettle you and that is Opera’s main concern. The displacing of what we expect to happen in a narrative like this knocks us out of our comfort zone. That the protagonist can have a cold attitude to just seeing a person killed may suggest that, actually, we’re being steered through the story by a character that is not in a mentally stable internal atmosphere, which Argento pushes, leaving us stranded. The only stable beings in the film are not even human but the ravens that dominate the theatre environment and influence how the murders are settled.

It is stripping down the typical plot line into a sensory effort. The scenes of tension, especially one in an apartment with a discomforting mistaking of identity, are effective if you give yourself up to the tone of the film, visually stunning beautiful grotesqueness, but it is completely abstract. Suspiria, even Inferno, even thought the latter especially is a fully abstracted work, have supernatural tones to make the curveballs and unexpected pulls back and forth more acceptable. Terror At The Opera plays within the same area within the vein of a obsessive killer plot, something we expect to be more conventional and realistic in a pulpy cinematic standard. That his influences, such as Edgar Allen Poe, were as much about the mental states of the characters and how it effects the environments around them help magnify this fact in Dario Argento’s work, making a drastic rewatching of his filmography, and covering up the gaps in my viewing, a necessary thing to do in the future. Hell, even the use of heavy metal music makes sense when you view the film like this.

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