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Opera
"Opera" (1987), directed by Dario Argento, follows a young understudy soprano stalked by an obsessive killer after she's forced into the lead role of a Verdi opera production following the star's accident, notable for its extended sequences filmed from inside an actual working opera house. Its recurring visual device of needles taped beneath the protagonist's eyes, forcing her to watch the killer's violence without being able to look away, became one of giallo cinema's most discussed and unsettling individual images, frequently cited in analyses of the genre's relationship to spectatorship. The film's elaborate crane and Steadicam work throughout the opera house setting demonstrated Argento's continued technical ambition even in the later, more divisive stretch of his directorial career following his most celebrated 1970s work. Its combination of its distinctive opera-house setting and its widely discussed visual set-pieces has made "Opera" one of the most stylistically ambitious later-period giallo films.
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Blood and Black Lace
"Blood and Black Lace" (1964), directed by Mario Bava, follows a masked killer murdering models at a Roman fashion house one by one, widely credited alongside Bava's earlier "The Girl Who Knew Too Much" as one of the two foundational films that established the giallo genre before Argento's later popularization of it. Its use of vividly colored gel lighting to render its murder sequences, transforming acts of violence into strikingly composed visual set-pieces, established a stylistic approach that nearly every subsequent giallo filmmaker, including Argento, directly built upon. Its multiple-suspect structure, following an ensemble of fashion house employees any of whom could plausibly be the killer, established the genre's now-standard approach to sustained whodunit misdirection across a full feature. Its combination of its foundational role establishing giallo's visual language and its influential ensemble mystery structure has made "Blood and Black Lace" one of the most historically important films in the genre's development.
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