Opera is a 1987 Italian giallo thriller co-written, produced and directed by Dario Argento. The film follows Betty, a young soprano who is unexpectedly thrust into the lead role in an avant-garde production of Verdi’s Macbeth after the original star is injured. What should have been her great breakthrough instead turns into a nightmare, as a masked killer begins murdering the people around her and forcing her to watch. Like several of Argento’s best-known films, Opera combines murder mystery with stylised violence, elaborate camera work and an almost dreamlike sense of dread, but it is especially distinctive for the way it fuses the world of grand opera with the mechanics of a stalker thriller.
The film is closely tied to Parma, where the Teatro Regio di Parma was used as the main opera-house location and gives the film much of its visual identity. Its richly decorated interior, stage spaces and backstage areas are not just background scenery, but the very heart of the story, turning the theatre into a maze of glamour, performance and terror. Additional filming took place in Rome, including studio work at De Paolis Studios, while some material was also shot in Lugano, Switzerland. Even so, it is Parma that dominates the film’s atmosphere, because the historic opera house allows Argento to set brutality against a setting of velvet, gold, music and old-world theatrical grandeur.
Teatro Regio di Parma
Teatro Regio di Parma has been used in several films, most notably Dario Argento’s Opera from 1987 and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution from 1964.
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