THE DEVIL WEARS BAVA

I swear this movie has colors I’ve never seen before in my life. Maybe it was just a pigment of my imagination.

A stunningly beautiful pioneer of a picture. This one has it all—an ominous killer, swanky soundtrack, a gaggle of models getting picked off, sexist pig men, brutal deaths, and the colors... my god the colors. It’s all here, a template for the next wave of lurid sleaze murder jams. A blueprint of classy black gloved art-filth. Some came before it, but the nail was totally hit on the head right here.

Essential Bava, essential cinema.

Why aren't movies allowed to look like this anymore?

Very fun, although I did have some trouble following the plot on account of everybody looking exactly the same.

Mario Bava's signature style of elegantly-crafted gruesomeness, artificial lights and painterly compositions meets its perfect material in this 60s pop art Giallo about a bunch of rich fashion designers and models who have surrounded themselves with an industry of beautiful surfaces and colorful images in an attempt to cover up their greedy, erotic, murderous impulses. Formally turning all their corruption and hollow beauty into this baroque dollhouse (as decadent in terms of production/costume design and lighting as it is sadistically violent!) as it moves through its many meticulous, technicolor funhouse murder machine setpieces. Honestly kind of astonishing how much of the visual vocabulary of the slasher was born right here in 1964, long before anyone who saw this at the time could've known what was coming. Alongside Suspiria and The Beyond, this is probably the Italian horror film.

Full discussion on ep 192 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

bava dreams in colors that don't even exist

89

I think I've finally nailed my love for Bava, and it goes beyond his fluid motions and scrumptious colors, his decorative mise en scène and nocturnal landscapes....

He. Does. Not. Fuck. Around.

If anything, Mario Bava is a master at evoking a setting and immediately peppering its rainbow images with intrigue and terror, romance and lust, violence and sexuality. He sets the chess pieces and instantly makes a dozen changes to initial moves and ideas, coherently building mystery while still enriching each frame in Gothic, illustrious shadow. Blood and Black Lace is astonishing in how it lights a face and captures the wind and the rain, but it is even more impressive how the character maneuverings are locked into an exemplary sense of environment. When people die, their void isn't only felt, but seen.

When the movie camera kills. Bava has always approached cinema as a cinematographer and not a dramatist, he regards everything in terms of shapes, light and color and not action and events and such post-human idea of film is pushed to limit here. The plot could be out of a krimi, but it is seen through a plastic surface: all shine sets, beautiful colors and actresses who becomes dolls to be butchered. The fashion setting serves it well, it is about evolving everything into this false surface and allow it to be destroyed. The images are beautiful and beauty equals death. The only empathy here is towards the murder's blade because Bava love those reds so much.

A masterpiece of shadowed colors, of composition, and of tension, this film feels like it's at least ten years early. Classify it as the precursor to slashers, as proto-giallo, as Italogothic horror if you please, but what I saw with my own two eyes was a classic slasher, fully formed. A beautiful one, certainly, one that doesn't have the grit and gore of its children, but our faceless killer stalks women one by one until they are all corpses, iconically garbed, and with a plot twist under the mask. Amazing that this was derived from krimi as a reaction, as an artistic flourish.

October count: 64/31

An eye-popping visual feast of murder, fashion and color overload. Play those opening credits on a loop forever.