There was a time when I was less squeamish and had a summer job in a video store in the North-East. My knowledge of the catalogue of gore was impressive. One of my favourite requests for slasher movies began: "Have you got the one where the woman in the supermarket gets her head chopped off?" Twenty years on, I miss out on Oscar-winning films because I don't enjoy watching cinema violence with any serious degree of bloodshed.

Opera is a different matter though. In the past two weeks, I've revelled in incestuous torture (Donazetti's Lucia di Lammermoor at ENO) and now Strauss's lurid Salome at the Opera House. There will be blood indeed: lots of it. But why does singing about death and destruction make it so much more palatable?

Salome fascinated Oscar Wilde (this libretto is adapted from the German translation of his 1890s tragedy) because she transgresses every norm of female behaviour: hers is an everyday tale of advanced religious obsession, voyeurism and violent sexual psychosis, all in the best biblical taste.

She manages to be even weirder than the ranting prophet locked in his obsessional belief. Virtually her first words to John the Baptist are "I want to kiss your mouth" - a misplaced passion mutating into an orgy of madness and a Salome in her white underwear smeared with the dripping blood of the prophet.

The horror in David McVicar's unsparing production is full-throttle - Salome demands the head of her love object and then drags it around the stage like a ragdoll oozing gore.

If you feel that only the camera can produce the stomach lurch of disgust and fascination, think again - but then opera makes us feel extreme emotion in a different way.

It's not really the fake blood that makes our hearts race. It is the pure terror and tension that only great music can convey, laid over a cracking story of mesmerising depravity. From Salome to the slasher movie: heads will roll.