Haunted Worlds: Mario Bava, the Diabolical Magician of Cinecittà

It wasn’t until he was 46 that Mario Bava (1914–1980) attained his first solo directorial credit with 1960’s Gothic horror classic, Black Sunday; he was, however, already a Cinecittà Studios veteran of 20-plus years who had by then become a brilliant cinematographer (working with Roberto Rossellini, Raoul Walsh and Jacques Tourneur, amongst many others) and a peerlessly creative shoestring special-effects magician. Bava was cinematographer for Riccardo Freda on Italy’s first sound-era horror film, I vampiri (1957), but wound up directing, uncredited, some scenes after Freda fell out with the producers.

Bava similarly co-directed Freda’s The Blob-inspired Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (1959), paving the way for an extraordinary directorial career (throughout which Bava often essayed other roles as well) marked by his exquisite, baroque use of colour and expressionistic black-and-white, discombobulating deployment of the zoom, a perverse eroticism and a wry sense of humour.

Not that many people in anglophone territories saw his films as they were meant to be seen until relatively recently – in bygone times, American International Pictures et al. commonly took terrible liberties recutting, refilming and redubbing his films before distributing them. While his name is synonymous with Italian horror – 1971’s A Bay of Blood set the template for every high-body-count slasher to follow – Bava worked in many other genres including the Western, giallo, fantasy, pepla (sword-and-sandal films) and science fiction.

While not skimping on the horror, this season pays tribute to Bava’s eclecticism, opening with the 1963 horror anthology classic hosted by Boris Karloff, Black Sabbath, and 1966’s Carpathians-set Gothic horror, Kill, Baby… Kill!, before moving on to the glorious fumetto-inspired crime caper, Danger: Diabolik (1968), and 1974’s gritty, Peckinpah-esque Rabid Dogs. The season closes with The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), the ur-giallo which introduced several of the trademark tropes of the genre (before Bava’s Blood and Black Lace introduced most of the rest in 1964), and 1973’s supernatural art-horror, Lisa and the Devil.

Presented in partnership with the Italian Institute of Culture, Melbourne.