Opera

A young understudy takes over Lady Macbeth in a cursed production of Verdi and picks up a stalker who tapes rows of needles beneath her eyes, so that closing them to escape the murders he stages means driving the points into her own lids. It is Argento's most sadistic image and the centre of a film where the camera never stops, soaring through the opera house on cranes, riding a bullet, flying with a raven that has its own subplot. He shot it while his father was dying and his relationship with Daria Nicolodi was ending, and the ugliness bleeds through, right down to the heavy-metal cues slammed incongruously over the killings. After this the run curdled, so treat it as the last night of the golden age. Worth ten of the lesser gialli it sits beside.