Opera

• Around 140 real ravens were used for the opera-house climax, and only about 60 were ever recaptured after filming — the rest escaped into the theater, according to co-star Urbano Barberini.
• The needles-taped-under-the-eyes torture device grew out of an in-joke: Argento said it always irritated him when audiences looked away during the scary parts of his films, and he'd joke about taping people's eyelids open so they couldn't.
• The UK VHS release was cut by the BBFC over sexualized violence (notably a scissors-to-the-mouth sequence), while the German home-video release trimmed more than 16 minutes of violent footage.
• Opera was actually a commercial hit in Italy — about 1.36 million ticket sales and roughly 4.7 billion lire at the box office — even though Orion Pictures shelved its planned U.S. release and it never got a UK theatrical run at all.
• Co-writer Franco Ferrini had already partnered with Argento on Phenomena (1985) before Opera, continuing their giallo writing collaboration.
• Cinematographer Ronnie Taylor — an Oscar winner for Gandhi — came aboard after shooting a swirling-camera Fiat Croma commercial with Argento earlier in 1987, which became the technical dry run for the film's elaborate opera-house tracking shots.

The killer's obsession with forcing Betty to watch functions as Argento's commentary on the horror genre itself—the audience is Betty, pinned in place, eyes forced open, consuming spectacle they cannot refuse. The needles are the medium.

The ravens aren't just set dressing for Verdi's Macbeth; they operate as the film's only moral witnesses, attacking the killer while every human character remains oblivious or complicit. Argento positions animals as the sole bearers of truth in a human world saturated with performance and deception.

Betty's recurring nightmares of her mother bound in a room hint that the opera house's onstage 'curse' is really the return of a suppressed childhood trauma: the killer's obsession began with Betty's mother years earlier, and seeing her face in the daughter reignites it. The production's murders play out like memory made literal — architecture staging a crime Betty half-witnessed as a child.

A young soprano lands the lead in a controversial Verdi production at a Parma opera house, and almost immediately someone starts murdering people around her—forcing her to watch by taping needles under her eyes. The killer knows the building's secret passages, the lighting rigs, the peepholes. As bodies pile up during rehearsals, the suspect pool narrows to everyone: the jealous director, the flamboyant agent, the creepy stagehand, even her own boyfriend. Meanwhile, wild ravens from the opera's final scene become unlikely witnesses to evil. Argento's most punishing formal experiment—point-of-view as assault, beauty as trap.