Saturday, October 22, 2022

The Twenty-First Night of Halloween 2022



ON THE TWENTY-FIRST NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Dario Argento’s Opera (1987). This film reinvents Phantom of the Opera as a late-period giallo epic. 

Betty is an understudy for the lead role in a highly anticipated Parma Opera House production of Verdi’s Macbeth. When the starring diva is struck by a car, Betty achieves sudden fame by performing as Lady Macbeth in the diva’s stead on opening night. Unfortunately, she just as quickly attracts a lethally obsessed fan in the form of a serial-killing stalker. The hooded killer on two successive nights manages to break in, tie Betty up, and fasten pins under her eyes. The killer does the latter so as to force Betty to watch the grisly murders of whomever she is with. As the third night falls, her only clue as to the face lurking under the hood is locked in an image from a recurring childhood nightmare …

I think Argento intended Opera to serve as a baroque swan song for the giallo genre, which had passed its prime a decade earlier. The Italian horror subgenre of the giallo, as we know, marries murder mystery sleuthing with gory slasher kills. Argento is himself regarded as the definitive master of the genre, with his Deep Red (1975) perhaps being the best giallo ever made. Opera is a much more expensive and ambitious production than most classic giallos, though, which balance artfulness with cheap sleaziness. And I think Opera suffers a bit because of its higher budget and grander aims, as it’s neither as aesthetically focused nor as convincingly written as Deep Red. But when rather viewed in the context of other operatic (here literally) gothic revival works of 80’s horror, it fares better. For one, it establishes itself as a worthy successor to the monumental 1925 version of Phantom of the Opera, certainly far beyond any of its other thirteen remakes. Its standout features include the authenticity of its behind-the-curtain scenes (which derives from Argento’s own abortive attempt to direct a production of Verdi’s Macbeth); some fantastic raven photography, the best moment of which comes when two ravens spar over a human eyeball in a shot that couldn’t have been choreographed but plays out like it was; and its innovative camera work, such as in a bird’s eye view that spins high over the opera audience, then dives down and strafes them in closer and closer circles. 

TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS:

Opera’s killer is a traditional giallo villain in that he (or possibly she) wears a mask and black leather gloves and wields a knife. The giallo villain is an iconic visualization of the murder mystery culprit. In turn, this unknown foe explodes the doppelgänger dynamic, in that, as long as the mystery remains unsolved, the killer maintains a presence as a faceless monster that could be hiding inside anyone. That is, while the doppelgänger is an alien identity wearing someone else’s face, a mystery killer is an unknown identity hiding among a number of faces. The two coincide when, in works like Carpenter’s The Thing, there is known to be a deadly imposter within a group, but which among them is unknown. This explains the frequency with which identical twins, actors (or opera performers), and disguises appear in murder mysteries. A killer can lead detectives (and the audience with them) down the wrong path by becoming a doppelgänger of an innocent party before committing bloody deeds. In this way, the fear that the doppelgänger inspires in us is Lovecraft’s “oldest and strongest kind of fear”—fear of the unknown.

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