Halloween Horrors are here again, with Varied Celluloid covering the latest in Horror cinema and the greatest of old. This month is a tribute to all things of the macabre, with this front page being taken up by horror reviews and thoughts. Check back daily for new reviews, as the rest of this month will be littered with sessions dealing with the obscure and the grotesque! Today we have Dario Argento’s last great thrust of Giallo horror in the form of Opera. Truly one of the best examples of stylish Italian horror and one of Argento’s best! Read on and enjoy the festivities!
The Review: For those familiar with Italian horror the name Dario Argento brings up visions of style and chic set design. Argento has made his career from having one of the best eyes for visual filmmaking in all of horror. His films from his pique, like those of Cronenberg or Lynch, have such tremendous visual flair to them that within minutes it becomes evident who the director was. His use of immaculate sets, delapidated buildings and nightmarish lighting creates an atmosphere that is so obviously “Argento”. Opera, which came at the end of his cinematic “best years”, is also his most stylish and uniquely visual film. Flying at the audience at breakneck speeds, Argento crafted a horror film using many of the techniques that made him so popular within the horror community but also outdid himself by throwing all of his visual know-how into every frame of this film. Within the first thirty minutes of Opera, Argento crafts an almost hypnotic allure as the camera in its ever flowing movements (more on this later) wanders about from large set to other large set in such a majestic and fantastic manner that the bloody violence becomes even more jarring to the senses. Truly, Opera is about the closest thing to a “sure bet” that has come from Argento’s filmography – it moves too fast, the violence is so over the top and the style is so thick that you just have to love it. I know that I most certainly do, and so do most Argento fans that I know as well, casual or diehard.