Mario Bava: Black on Black
Aug. 3rd, 2011 10:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustFor one reason and another--I think maybe 'Net service broke in the middle, while I was composing it--I was utterly unable to send this to sovay last night. So here's a bit of me going on and on about Mario Bava.
I got interested in him for three reasons, over a period of years: First, he had a definite, traceable impact on Dario Argento, whose stuff I totally inhaled after being punched between the eyes by Suspiria (though the first Argento film I actually ever saw was Creepers, the cut-down version of Phenomena, which stars a very young Jennifer Connelly as a girl who can communicate psychically with bugs, particularly the "coffin-flies" that like to colonize corpses); second, Black Sunday is mentioned in Danny Peary's esssential reference book(s) Cult Movies (Vol.s 1, 2 and 3, which became a bit of a triple bible for me, in terms of guiding my rentals); and third, he's a subject of intense interest for Tim Lucas, the critic/author who edits the magazine Video Watchdog, and also wrote the equally film-obsessed vampire novel Throat Sprockets.
Black Sunday/Mask of the Demon and Black Sabbath are probably his best-known films. One's a black and white witch/vampire film (loosely based on the short story "Viy") which established then-young British actress Barbara Steele as a sexy horror icon, while the other is a phantasmagoric technicolour anthology film with three sections, each linked by the participation of Boris Karloff in one of his most striking latter-day roles. (In terms of career-cappers, it's basically a toss-up between "The Wurdulak", Black Sabbath's middle section, and his turn as an old, sick yet still totally kick-ass version of himself in Peter Bogdanovich's Targets.)
(Not to mention that Black Sabbath, equally obviously, was the inspiration for the seminal British doom metal band calling themselves that. Bava is everywhere!)
The thing about Bava that obviously really sunk deep into Argento, and influenced almost everybody else in the burgeoning Italian horror movement, is that he was an absolute master of artificiality. As Lucas's commentary notes, he creates whole forest journeys just by having crew-members walk around the camera with tree-limbs while a horse and carriage "rides" back and forth along the same eight-foot track, changes characters with an angle and a lighting shift, uses the surreal disconnectedness of routine dubbing like another layer in his eerie soundscape. The weird decay and beauty of his "Moldavian" fantasia in Black Sunday is amazing, chiaroscuro, a perfect illustration of how black and white can make anything interesting, even a five-lire set and ten-lire acting.
But when he switches over to technicolour for Black Sabbath, impressively enough, things get even more odd--he colour-codes like no one I've ever seen, not even Argento, who tends to go for rich, saturated yet fairly naturalistic palettes. Bava floods everything with pale blue, acid green, even pink, and makes it look not only cool, but horrifying. The dead medium's corpse in "A Drop of Water", Black Sabbath's climactic sequence, is one of the most awful inanimate objects I've ever seen on screen...particularly so when it stops being inanimate. (One look at its fixed eyes and waxy, rigid smile and you can totally see where James Wan and Leigh Whannell got the fear of old ladies which gave birth to both Dead Silence and certain resonant elements of Insidious, too.)
And the best part about this double bill of purchases? They cost me a combined fee of maybe $30.00 Canadian, because they're "boring" old movies, and nobody else wants them. Score two for archivist fever.
Okay, I slept a loooong time, and I need to get going. Cal at home, stuff to do. But this makes an okay placeholder, I think...
Amended to add: Have a quick filmography--
1960 Black Sunday
1960 Esther and the King
1961 Hercules in the Haunted World
1961 Erik the Conqueror
1961 The Wonders of Aladdin
1961 The Last of the Vikings--Four films in a year, four different genres, all shot on the same studio sound-stages, sometimes simultaneously.
1963 The Girl Who Knew Too Much
1963 Black Sabbath
1963 Blood and Black Lace--Indescribably brutal and fetishistic giallo "mystery" centred around a bunch of lingerie models.
1963 The Whip and the Body--One of the first films to explore the S&M underworld.
1964 The Road to Fort Alamo
1964 Planet of the Vampires--Unacknowledged inspiration for sections of Alien, particularly the Space Jockey sequence.
1964 Knives of the Avenger
1966 Kill, Baby, Kill--Weirdest and most discomfiting little ghost girl ever.
1966 Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs--Like Austin Powers done straight.
1968 Danger: Diabolik--Fumetti-inspired style-over-substance triumph, parodied in the Beastie Boys' "Body Movin'" video.
1970 Five Dolls for an August Moon
1970 Hatchet for the Honeymoon--Best first lines ever. They are: "My name is John Harrington. I'm 30 years old. I'm a paranoiac. Paranoiac. An enchanting word, so civilized, full of possibilities. The truth is, I am completely mad. The realization of which annoyed me at first, but is now amusing to me. Quite amusing. Nobody suspects I am a madman. A dangerous murderer. Not Mildred, my wife. Nor the employees of my fashion center. Nor of course my customers. [scoops a fly out of his drink] Poor little fly. Why are you so daring? You're so fragile? Yet you're born, you reproduce yourself, and you die like man. The difference is you don't think. And, you don't need to remember. You don't fear death because you ignore it. Your insignificant life is a mere accident. But death exists I assure you, and that's what makes life a ridiculous and brutal drama. But the fact remains that I have killed five young women. Three of whom are buried in the hothouse. Carol, Mary and Margaret. They were the friendliest, the most attractive ones. There is one problem. I must go on wielding the cleaver. It's most annoying. But when I begin to hear the footsteps. Those stealthy footsteps, and I know I just have to kill. And shall have to keep on killing, until I find out the truth. That's it, the whole truth."
1970 Roy Colt and Winchester Jack
1971 Twitch of the Death Nerve--Five Little Indians-style trapped-characters-are-knocked-off "mystery" with extra gore; unacknowledged inspiration for Friday the 13th.
1972 Baron Blood
1972 Four Times That Night
1973 Lisa and the Devil--Bava does The Exorcist.
1974 Rabid Dogs
1977 Shock
1979 The Venus of Ille
I got interested in him for three reasons, over a period of years: First, he had a definite, traceable impact on Dario Argento, whose stuff I totally inhaled after being punched between the eyes by Suspiria (though the first Argento film I actually ever saw was Creepers, the cut-down version of Phenomena, which stars a very young Jennifer Connelly as a girl who can communicate psychically with bugs, particularly the "coffin-flies" that like to colonize corpses); second, Black Sunday is mentioned in Danny Peary's esssential reference book(s) Cult Movies (Vol.s 1, 2 and 3, which became a bit of a triple bible for me, in terms of guiding my rentals); and third, he's a subject of intense interest for Tim Lucas, the critic/author who edits the magazine Video Watchdog, and also wrote the equally film-obsessed vampire novel Throat Sprockets.
Black Sunday/Mask of the Demon and Black Sabbath are probably his best-known films. One's a black and white witch/vampire film (loosely based on the short story "Viy") which established then-young British actress Barbara Steele as a sexy horror icon, while the other is a phantasmagoric technicolour anthology film with three sections, each linked by the participation of Boris Karloff in one of his most striking latter-day roles. (In terms of career-cappers, it's basically a toss-up between "The Wurdulak", Black Sabbath's middle section, and his turn as an old, sick yet still totally kick-ass version of himself in Peter Bogdanovich's Targets.)
(Not to mention that Black Sabbath, equally obviously, was the inspiration for the seminal British doom metal band calling themselves that. Bava is everywhere!)
The thing about Bava that obviously really sunk deep into Argento, and influenced almost everybody else in the burgeoning Italian horror movement, is that he was an absolute master of artificiality. As Lucas's commentary notes, he creates whole forest journeys just by having crew-members walk around the camera with tree-limbs while a horse and carriage "rides" back and forth along the same eight-foot track, changes characters with an angle and a lighting shift, uses the surreal disconnectedness of routine dubbing like another layer in his eerie soundscape. The weird decay and beauty of his "Moldavian" fantasia in Black Sunday is amazing, chiaroscuro, a perfect illustration of how black and white can make anything interesting, even a five-lire set and ten-lire acting.
But when he switches over to technicolour for Black Sabbath, impressively enough, things get even more odd--he colour-codes like no one I've ever seen, not even Argento, who tends to go for rich, saturated yet fairly naturalistic palettes. Bava floods everything with pale blue, acid green, even pink, and makes it look not only cool, but horrifying. The dead medium's corpse in "A Drop of Water", Black Sabbath's climactic sequence, is one of the most awful inanimate objects I've ever seen on screen...particularly so when it stops being inanimate. (One look at its fixed eyes and waxy, rigid smile and you can totally see where James Wan and Leigh Whannell got the fear of old ladies which gave birth to both Dead Silence and certain resonant elements of Insidious, too.)
And the best part about this double bill of purchases? They cost me a combined fee of maybe $30.00 Canadian, because they're "boring" old movies, and nobody else wants them. Score two for archivist fever.
Okay, I slept a loooong time, and I need to get going. Cal at home, stuff to do. But this makes an okay placeholder, I think...
Amended to add: Have a quick filmography--
1960 Black Sunday
1960 Esther and the King
1961 Hercules in the Haunted World
1961 Erik the Conqueror
1961 The Wonders of Aladdin
1961 The Last of the Vikings--Four films in a year, four different genres, all shot on the same studio sound-stages, sometimes simultaneously.
1963 The Girl Who Knew Too Much
1963 Black Sabbath
1963 Blood and Black Lace--Indescribably brutal and fetishistic giallo "mystery" centred around a bunch of lingerie models.
1963 The Whip and the Body--One of the first films to explore the S&M underworld.
1964 The Road to Fort Alamo
1964 Planet of the Vampires--Unacknowledged inspiration for sections of Alien, particularly the Space Jockey sequence.
1964 Knives of the Avenger
1966 Kill, Baby, Kill--Weirdest and most discomfiting little ghost girl ever.
1966 Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs--Like Austin Powers done straight.
1968 Danger: Diabolik--Fumetti-inspired style-over-substance triumph, parodied in the Beastie Boys' "Body Movin'" video.
1970 Five Dolls for an August Moon
1970 Hatchet for the Honeymoon--Best first lines ever. They are: "My name is John Harrington. I'm 30 years old. I'm a paranoiac. Paranoiac. An enchanting word, so civilized, full of possibilities. The truth is, I am completely mad. The realization of which annoyed me at first, but is now amusing to me. Quite amusing. Nobody suspects I am a madman. A dangerous murderer. Not Mildred, my wife. Nor the employees of my fashion center. Nor of course my customers. [scoops a fly out of his drink] Poor little fly. Why are you so daring? You're so fragile? Yet you're born, you reproduce yourself, and you die like man. The difference is you don't think. And, you don't need to remember. You don't fear death because you ignore it. Your insignificant life is a mere accident. But death exists I assure you, and that's what makes life a ridiculous and brutal drama. But the fact remains that I have killed five young women. Three of whom are buried in the hothouse. Carol, Mary and Margaret. They were the friendliest, the most attractive ones. There is one problem. I must go on wielding the cleaver. It's most annoying. But when I begin to hear the footsteps. Those stealthy footsteps, and I know I just have to kill. And shall have to keep on killing, until I find out the truth. That's it, the whole truth."
1970 Roy Colt and Winchester Jack
1971 Twitch of the Death Nerve--Five Little Indians-style trapped-characters-are-knocked-off "mystery" with extra gore; unacknowledged inspiration for Friday the 13th.
1972 Baron Blood
1972 Four Times That Night
1973 Lisa and the Devil--Bava does The Exorcist.
1974 Rabid Dogs
1977 Shock
1979 The Venus of Ille
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Date: 2011-08-03 03:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-03 03:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-03 04:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-03 04:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-03 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-03 03:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-03 03:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-03 06:28 pm (UTC)Who has just had a documentary come out about her. I think I only have seen her in 8½.
Bava floods everything with pale blue, acid green, even pink, and makes it look not only cool, but horrifying.
He sounds kind of like he took the Hammer Horror aesthetic and ran it with it even further than Terence Fisher, which is saying something. Also, kind of like I need to see him.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-03 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-03 07:02 pm (UTC)Oh, and I once met a guy with a badass Bava sleeve, the focal point being Barbara from --utterly gorgeous, deeply disturbing imagery.
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Date: 2011-08-03 07:39 pm (UTC)