Blood and Black Lace (1964)

Director: Mario Bava
Writer: Giusseppe Barilla, Marcel Fonda, Marrcello Fondato, Mario Bava

The models at a house of high fashion are stalked and murdered one by one. Can the murderer be discovered before all the girls are dead?

It's sad, really, that as important to the horror genre as Mario Bava is, he's still a grossly underappreciated figure. His films have had such an enormous impact on the horror and thriller forms in film that the absence of his name is really a travesty. Blood and Black Lace stands as one of the high watermarks of a prolific career including nearly forty films. Along with The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), Bava nearly invented the giallo in Italy with this film. A breed of intensely violent thrillers so named from the yellow-covered pulp novels that were popular in Italy after the Second World War. And Blood and Black Lace has a very pulp narrative to it. The story revolves around the potential exposure of a drug ring based out of an Italian haute couture house. After the death of a model, her diary surfaces, which may, or may not, contain incriminating evidence that could indict the individuals involved. While this is central to the narrative, the audience is not especially interested in it. Already by the mid-60s horror audiences are more interested in the sheer spectacle of the death scene than the mystery at hand. This type of body-count picture was later fully developed by Bava in his 1971 classic Bay of Blood (a.k.a. Twitch of the Death Nerve). We have a central heroine with whom the audience is most interested but the deaths take precedence over narrative and for the visual beauty of the film, and that’s totally fine.

What stands out the most in this, and many of Bava's later films, are the very cinematic death scenes. Bava films his deaths scenes with an attention to achieving the highest level of artistry and visual pizzazz, an aspect that would be picked up by Dario Argento. Each death is filmed and presented in such a way that the violence is almost supplanted by the aesthetic glory of the shots. Take for example the first death of the film, the one that kicks the narrative into gear. A model in a bright red rain slicker is taking a short cut through the woods (I know, pretty cliché but trust me, it's fantastic) when she's attacked by the killer. The scene, like those that follow it, is lit and colored so well and dramatically that the death takes on a surreal, hallucinatory quality. Despite the fact it's supposed to the middle of the night, the woods are lit to spooky perfection and the model's rain slicker stands out against all the darkness. Violent though the scene is the model and the shots retain a beauty from the previously mentioned lighting and camera set-ups.

My favorite death scene from this film is also the most tragic and shocking. Unlike the others in which we first see the victim then the attack, the death of Tao-Li (Claude Dantes) begins as she's strangled underwater in her bra and panties. By this time in America, the Production Code was only beginning to allow this kind of sexually and violence on theatre screens. But this scene provides such intense imagery that, according to Bava scholar Tim Lucas, that the end of the scene, which sticks out in my mind above all else in the film, was cut for American and home video release and only recently reinserted. As Tao-Li's body sinks under the bathwater, her eyes opened, her wrist is cut to make her death look like a suicide. Bava cuts to a close up of her face under the water and from the bottom of the frame, in sharp contrast to the light blue water and white bra, Tao-Li's blood begins mixing with the water. While this is stock-in-trade for modern horror, Bava's presentation of the shot is disturbing for showing what Lucas refers to as "the angel in the wreckage." While the scene is destructive, the presentation is such that it is equally beautiful.

As I said before, I think it's a crime that Bava is not a more widely celebrated or even discussed director. His influence is seen in the work of such commercially successful directors as Martin Scorsese. Perhaps I have affection for and affinity to critically slighted filmmakers but Blood and Black Lace stands as one of greatest but too little seen horror masterpieces.

Suggested reading material:
Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark by Tim Lucas