Near the end of his life Italian horror maestro Mario Bava confessed to the magazine L’espresso, “In my entire career, I made only big bullshits, no doubt about that….I’m just a craftsman. A romantic craftsman….I made movies just like making chairs.”
More often than not Bava’s tales are strangely sexual. In the marketplace his most important predecessor was Britain’s Hammer Films, which had stormed American theaters in the late 50s with gory and sexually suggestive remakes of Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy. Yet aside from generous helpings of cleavage the early Hammer releases were too morally rigid to trade very heavily in sexual themes. Bava’s low-budget horror flicks explore the same landscape with a more adventurous attitude toward violence and sensuality.
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Black Sunday was the first of these new horror films to center on a female villain. Steele gives an erotic dual performance as a beautiful young princess and her wicked ancestor, a vampire who rises from the grave after 200 years. The delirious Kill, Baby…Kill! (1966) tells the tale of a girl (played by a boy, Valerio Valeri) who’s been trampled to death during a village festival and returns to drive her survivors to suicide. Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971) became a prototype for Halloween and Friday the 13th with its darkly funny story about six couples, most of them angling for a coveted piece of waterfront property, who meet their ends by the end. And Bava’s masterpiece, Lisa and the Devil (1972), is a personal valentine to actress Elke Sommer that reflects heavily on carnal pleasure, erupting into moments of black humor and haunting visual poetry. Clearly Bava was a man who loved women–even if he was compelled on occasion to run them through.
The younger physician (John Richardson) falls for Katia, though he’s easily misled by her doppelganger from beyond the grave. Bava explicitly links sex and death in the film’s most frightening moment, when the physician grabs the princess by the cloak and thrusts a crucifix at her; pulling away, she reveals beneath her cloak not the princess’s lovely bosom but the vampire’s naked and bloody rib cage.
These homages aside, many sequences in Kill, Baby…Kill! are highly original. Near the end of the film the doctor hears the heroine crying out and dashes through a door into a room where a large painting hangs. At the end of the room is a door, which he passes through to find himself in an identical room with an identical door, which he passes through to find himself in an identical room, and so forth. Then the doctor catches sight of a fleeing figure and gives chase, passing through the room again and again, until he catches the figure, spins it around, and confronts–himself! Horrified, the doctor covers his face, and when he looks up again the figure is gone. He wanders toward the painting, a large landscape covered by a cobweb, and after getting tangled in the web he’s transported outdoors to the site of the painting.
Twitch of the Death Nerve was shocking not only for its violence but for its bitter misanthropy: almost every-one in the film is corrupt, and at the end, after Renata and Albert have finally murdered their way into possession of the prized estate, their two school-age children blow them away with a double-barreled shot-gun and go skipping off to frolic in the bay.
If Bava spent his career making chairs, this is a very sturdy and handsome one, a story that became a repository for 40 years of photo-graphic technique and many of his favorite themes: family dysfunction, sexual sin, the inescapable specter of death. Ironically, it met the cruelest fate of any Bava film: after a promising premiere at Cannes in 1973 it secured distribution only in Spain, and after two years Leone decided to make the most of his investment by turning the film into an Exorcist knockoff. Bava reluctantly agreed to shoot some new scenes of a possessed Lisa being exorcised by Robert Alda, but he asked that his name be taken off the project; the new cut, released as The House of Exorcism, was roundly panned. Since Black Sunday Bava had averaged two films a year, but after Lisa and the Devil he made only three more before dying of a heart attack in 1980.
