ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — These are eyes you could truly get lost in, and probably never emerge from. They belong to the title character of “Acquanetta,” a spine-tingling chamber opera by Michael Gordon and Deborah Artman at Bard SummerScape festival. And when you first see them, you’ll probably have no idea what they are.

That’s because in this production — directed by the hot (and cool) theater auteur Daniel Fish at Bard College’s Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts here — they are filmed in simulcast video, in the kind of merciless, magnifying close-ups usually reserved for biology labs. Projected in scratchy black-and-white onto a large screen glowing from a blank, black stage, the eyes of the 1940s cult movie star Acquanetta (portrayed by Rebecca L. Hargrove) read as fathomless whirlpools, edged in spiky vegetation, from some alien landscape.

The music that accompanies this vision has that repeated, assaultive scraping sound you associate with horror movies (Bernard Herrmann’s score for “Psycho,” in particular). A melding of human voices and shrieking strings, it’s a full-throttle scream transformed into pulsing melody. And it’s enough to make the hairs of even a slasher-flick devotee stand on end.