There's more knife than whip but that's fine because Bava does his usual creating a stylish, deliberately paced, gothic feast for the eyes via wonderful set design, stellar cinematography, and an an almost monochromatic color scheme mixed with his ever present manipulations of shadow. A deviant ghost lover, a castle complete with crypt and secret passageways, ghostly muddy footprints, an ominous beach, The Whip and the Body is quite the captivating story of love, denial, and S&M with Christopher Lee ramping up levels of sadistic scumbaggery in ways we may never seen from him prior. 

Dubbing never really bothers me since I’ve become so used to it, but the continuous use of the score and a leetle sluggish pacing here and there…

So many of Bava's films take place in remote or near abandoned places -- Kill, Baby, Kill!'s remote village, the isolated farm house in Black Sabbath's wurdulak sequence, deserted planets in Planet of the Vampires, or even, for a more modern example, the nearly uninhabited island of 5 Dolls for an August Moon. But none of them felt quite as remote as The Whip and the Body.

Bava punctuates the film over and over with long shots of a lonely sea shore, the dark silhouette of a castle brooding above it. The sun, at times, a dim pinprick of light in the deep distance. This, to me, is the film's dominant, central image. The dimming light of a (dying?) world.…

Spooktober IV: Morte all'italiana

From one staple name in the giallo world to the one that some say got the ball rolling, Mario Bava’s first entry in this marathon sees him diving into the gothic horror genre under a silly pseudonym (John M. Old) and the icon of the genre himself, Christopher Lee, doing what he knew what to do best back in the day: torture beautiful woman and wanting to take their souls.

Visually speaking, the film is stunning to look at with some of the best cinematography and production design on a Bava’s movie. He also does a great job capturing much of the tone of these films, the blend between lushy romance, melodrama, and horror. Lee is…

Spoilers ahead.

“There’s always suspicion about a woman’s truth.”
— Kathleen Hanna

Until its awkward last 10 minutes, Mario Bava's The Whip and the Body is a fascinating examination of the role of women in their own lives, and the ways they find to exert power in a patriarchal system.

In many ways, Nevenka (Daliah Lavi, whose tiny mouth and huge eyes call to mind the work of painter Margaret Keane, and only serve to enhance the film's sumptuous air of unreality) is a stereotypically horror heroine. Tortured by forces beyond her control and unseen by others, she initially appears to be framed simply as 'victim,' and as someone in need of salvation by men — from herself most of…

A cursed dagger kept in a glass case… a devilish knight who comes back to his father’s castle… the blood of an innocent victim that demands revenge… an obscure affair… secret passages… the shadow of a ghost. The whole Gothic imaginary is present… almost pressed… in a single place, Menliff castle, which is built… almost perched… on a cliff close to the shore, where, one bad day, the immoral and irreverent elder son Kurt comes back to celebrate his brother, Christian, who married Nevenka. His arrogance and the overt cold duplicity that Christopher Lee uses to play Kurt do not fool us: we can expect anything from a man who seduced, left and caused the suicide of the daughter of…