THE EARLY YEARS
Mario Bava was born on 29th July 1914 in Sanremo, Liguria, a province that sits in the far north-east corner of Italy, nestled beneath Piedmont and playing next-door neighbour to the French Riviera. As a ‘figlio d’arte’ (child of the arts) his ties to the film world were provided his father, the sculptor and cinematographer Eugenio Bava (1886 – 1966), whose artistry and pioneering experimental photography was utilised in the burgeoning Italian movie-making industry of the 1900s.
Young Bava started his own journey into the business in the 1930s. He began at LUCE (L’ Unione Cinematografica Educativa, founded 1924) in the optical effects department. According to Tim Lucas’ extensive research and the subsequently published filmography, found in the pages of Mario Bava: All The Colors of the Dark (2007), he earned his stripes in various departmental subdivisions: main title design, animation and special trick photography. During these formative years – and into the 1940s and 1950s – he was hired (in various capacities) on projects that today serve to highlight the director’s remarkable place in post-war Italian cinema. Like Woody Allen’s chameleon character Leonard Zelig, Bava seemed to be there at decisive industry moments and played a part in the launching of genres whose best pictures are today praised and loved as cult classics. There’s even an association with Neo-realism. Bava can take no responsibility or credit for popularising the Spaghetti Western, but he did eventually make one (The Road to Fort Alamo, 1964). The same goes for hugely successful ‘sex comedies’.
One of the most interesting aspect of the director’s personality, given his chosen field of work (low-budget genre pictures often involving themes of horror), was how many colleagues, friends and family members attested to Bava having been genuinely afraid of the dark. Ghost stories and the fantastical stuff of nightmares disturbed him on a profound level. This shouldn’t be so surprising. By all accounts, he was a sensitive and very modest man. ‘My dreams are always horrible,’ Bava once stated, ‘there’s a character that continuously haunts me in my nightmares, he’s a musician that serenades his lover with a violin, strings with the nerves of his own arm’. (Pirie, 1977: 158)
During the first interview with him ever to appear in print, for the magazine Horror, and under the article headline ‘The Hitchcock of Cinecittà’, Bava further elucidated, though still managing to be evasive at the same time, on his attraction to morbid themes:
Terror fascinates and attracts me, but for no particular reason. Perhaps it’s a question of psychology … to make a film of this kind helps me overcome my own fears. The lights, the technicians, and the actors help to defuse an atmosphere that, in real life, would be enough to make me die of fright. (Lucas, 2007: 18)
BEFORE BLACK SUNDAY
In 1956 a low-budget film was produced titled I vampiri (The Vampires). Bava stepped in not only to complete the picture, but reconceptualised it after the director, Riccardo Freda, walked off set (see chapter 2). I vampiri was actually Italy’s first proper foray into Gothic territory since 1921. Bava’s career as a credited film-maker, however, did not proceed in earnest from this landmark production. He returned to work as a renowned cameraman and hired hand on a number of pictures that included Hercules (Le fatiche di Ercole, 1958) starring Steve Reeves, a film that kick-started a popular cycle of Pepla (Sword-and-Sandal flicks).
Further evidence of Bava’s propensity to be in the right place at the right time, after I vampiri and Hercules, he became involved with the European co-production, Death Came from Outer Space (US title: The Day The Sky Exploded, 1958). Tim Lucas has written that Italy’s first-ever sci-fi flick was Bava’s debut as a director in all but name. Owing to several factors – such as the financial backers requiring somebody with proper experience at calling the shots – he received no official acknowledgment. Paolo Heusch, a name forgotten today, bagged the ‘directed by’ credit.
In 1959, Bava teamed up once more with Riccardo Freda to make Caltiki – Il Mostro Immortale (Caltiki – The Immortal Monster). Again, he was left to complete the movie after Freda walked off set. After employment on Jacques Torneur’s The Giant Marathon (1959), producers recognised beyond doubt that this shy and retiring cameraman/effects magician/problem-solver could be a great director whose invention and panache was impressive, even if the material could be sub-par. Most importantly (for the producers, at least), he finished on time and kept within the confines of the budget. Bava’s career in the Italian film industry, before making his debut proper, explained why Black Sunday made such an instant impact.
THE AUTEUR SITUATION OF SIGNOR HORROR
Although we look to critics and reviewers to guide our taste and define the cinematic milieu in popular culture, we cannot always rely on them to get things right first time round. Some film-makers are not immediately recognised and it can take years for retrospective opinion to take hold. The word ‘genius’ crops up time and time again, where Mario Bava is concerned. But how can a man who spent twenty years directing schlocky fare and filoni (‘formula films’, but also a complicated term with subtle distinctions within industry and critical study) ever be considered for membership to the pantheon of the medium’s greatest talent? Aren’t these coveted spaces reserved for the lofty likes of D.W. Griffith, Jean Renoir, Sergei Eisenstein and other prestigious types? What Andrew Sarris referred to as a ‘Ptolemaic constellation of directors in a fixed orbit,’ and something he actually cautioned against (1962: 563).
His first picture was feted by critics, but there seemed to be a subsequent disappointment. Many things worked against the director, such as his lack of control with foreign distributors re-cutting his work willy-nilly. Snobbery against the horror genre shouldn’t be discounted, either. His reputation dwindled somewhat with reviewers and writers lamenting that he never fulfilled the promise of his debut. A more recent assessment, based on a revival of interest, has helped re-establish the director as one of the medium’s true masters and many today consider him worthy of auteur status even if such a term doesn’t carry the weight it once did.
In the 1990s, several major retrospectives were held in France (the country that took note of Bava very early on), the UK and USA. Directors such as Martin Scorsese and Tim Burton began to discuss what Bava meant to them and paid homage, via visual or narrative quotations, in their own work. Joe Dante went one further and cast Barbara Steele in Piranha (1977). Scorsese purloined from Kill, Baby … Kill! (1966) the concept of an evil spirit in the guise of a small child for his controversial The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).
In Julian Petley’s review of City of the Living Dead (Film & Filming, June 1982), the critic highlighted a comment made by Lucio Fulci, who became known as the ‘Godfather of Gore’ after a raft of surrealistic pictures in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, that acknowledged Bava’s cultural standing and its eventual shift. ‘Bava’s films, too, rest on their technical aspect, their special effects and suspense: they’ve thus really no need of actors. But Bava was despised in Italy: he and Freda were ignored and critics spoke of the genius of Bava only after his death’ (1982: 33).
Scorsese provided the introduction to Tim Lucas’ Mario Bava: All The Colors of the Dark (2007):
Bava was not a great storyteller, but he didn’t have to be and he wasn’t trying to be. He was good – very good – at something else. He used light, shadow and color, sound (on and off-screen), movement and texture down uncharted paths into a kind of collective dream. (2007: 13)
Interviewed for an Italian television documentary, Operazione Paura (2004), Hollywood kook Tim Burton also noted this dream ambience: ‘They were so much truly like bringing dreams to life.’ Roger Corman, interviewed for the same documentary, and a man who knows a thing or two about financial prudence and working on miniscule budgets, reasoned that not only were the films themselves so remarkable, the man’s sense of professionalism was equally admirable: ‘His genius – and I really do believe it was a genius – and an inspiration to those who came after him, was that whatever the circumstance or situation, you can do excellent work.’
We live in age where auteur theory is less celebrated as a model of critical study than it was in its heyday. In whatever guise or model, it has remained popular – the director is still the focus of obsession – and it has been appropriated today as a marketing tool. The term ‘vulgar auteurism’ has been banded around, too, as a way to highlight genre filmmakers whose work previously has been unappreciated by mainstream critics. In many ways, auteur theory is tailor-made for Bava. Whether you dig the auteurist approach as a critical avenue of exploration or loathe it as romantic nonsense, it’s a war that we must brave. Take a side, if you will.
Could Mario Bava qualify as an auteur film-maker? The question has been asked many times over the years, and with a range of affirmatives and dismissals. Using the Sarris theory, while it has remained absolutely clear that Bava’s work was routinely compromised and changed, he did boast a distinct visual authority and stamp and was more than technically competent (the use of the crash zoom, Joe Dante has jokingly claimed, approached abuse of technique) and the dysfunctional family unit is a theme/scenario that has cropped up. It must be noted, too, that he was very often the cinematographer and camera operator on his own pictures (sometimes credited and sometimes not). He was very hands-on in the special effects departments (again, taking no credit) and worked on stories and scenarios. His modesty forbade credit-hogging.
One magazine declared him ‘Signor Horror’. Journeymen film-makers do not earn nicknames, it must be said. In terms of film culture, being labelled an auteur (and being named ‘Signor Horror’) are also marketable assets. We often describe thrillers as ‘Hitchcockian’. In a fair world – if he was a household name and not a cult figure – ‘Bavian’ would be an equally popular term. Looking at the career of Mario Bava, in total, he is an exceptional case and clearly an influential film-maker – not only on genres but other directors. He was no mere journeyman, for sure.
Julian Petley likened Bava to his compatriot, Lucio Fulci, in the City of the Living Dead review for Film & Filming and qualified both as metteur en scène directors. (I’ve always thought this the critically polite way of saying ‘close but no cigar’.) But can a metteur en scène become an auteur? Although Pauline Kael accused the Sarrisian model of potentially elevating what could be deemed trivial matters to the heights of high art and focusing on a director’s filmography as a series of dull repetitions, it can prove useful enough, however limited one ultimately deemed it. Whether you think Bava a supreme visual stylist alone or an out-and-out auteur, it’s a matter of staking an opinion.
1960 is considered a fine vintage year in the illustrious and often controversial annals of horror cinema. Not only did Mario Bava, at the relatively late age of 45, make his credited directorial debut, Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, Roger Corman’s The Fall of the House of Usher, and of course, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, all presented latent fears in public spaces. Roger Vadim, too, helped establish the lesbian vampire subgenre with Blood and Roses, a reworking of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872). Whether it was human monsters (what Charles Derry described as an entirely new subgenre, ‘the horror of personality’) or old fashioned supernatural beasts at the centre of the narrative storm, the genre entered new territory, where directors pushed the envelope, the censors frowned and most critics bothered. Directors pushed the envelope and audiences lapped it up. These flicks brought peculiar, sick, strange and unseemly relationships to the fore and taboo subject matters appeared in clearer focus. Writer and historian Carlos Clarens (1930–1987) stated the horror movie was something of a historical imperative and worked as a mass psychotherapy session. I very much admire, too, the simple but searching question posed by Charles Derry: ‘Why is the world so horrible?’ (1977: 82).
Kim Newman in Nightmare Movies stated: ‘To me, the central thesis of horror in film and literature is that the world is a more frightening place than is generally assumed’ (1988: 5). H.P. Lovecraft, Bava’s favourite author, noted in his essay, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’: ‘The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown’ (Lovecraft, 1927: 7).
In the English-speaking world, writers such as Clarens, Ivan Butler and Robin Wood began to twig that the genre was indeed something that would benefit from being prized apart from alignments to fantasy pictures and could stand alone and be worthy of serious critical exploration. Firstly, why did audiences pay hard-earned money to essentially be frightened out of their wits? According to Clarens there is ‘Inside us a constant, ever-present yearning for the fantastic, for the darkly mysterious, for the choked terror of the dark’ (Clarens, 1968: 9), and Derry argued for our ‘subconscious need to deal with things that frighten us’ (1977: 21).
Perversion, psychological torments and madness, irrationality, eroticism, brutal death and the supernatural all mingled freely. The Marquis de Sade wrote once that ‘There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image’ (Bataille, 1957: 11). This statement rings loudest and truest in the vampire genre, where the link between sex and death is absolutely vital and can play host to a range of visual metaphors and symbols. We can ban, censor and repress as much as we like, but kink will out.
Black Sunday is a film that takes place within a sub-category Charles Derry defined as the ‘horror of the demonic’. Here, supernatural forces can explain away the evil of our world and that moral/social order can be maintained via the eternal battle between Good and Evil. The essence of Black Sunday – and the general theme of ‘horror of the demonic’ – is centred on corruption of the innocence and an open attack on the everyday order of things. One is natural and the other unnatural and must be fought against and destroyed before equilibrium can be restored.
Films such as Black Sunday helped the horror genre gain a certain cache as titles worthy of study. In Theodore Roszak’s novel, Flicker (1991), two characters exchange views that cleverly highlighted the often luckless artistic and critical value of horror films. A rather haughty German director, a guest at a stereotypically libertine Hollywood producer’s house party, tells a fleapit theatre owner and sometime critic: ‘Surely you aren’t suggesting we give trash like Feast of the Undead serious critical attention!’ (1991: 99).
Although dealing with titles at the grindhouse end of the genre spectrum (and erroneously suggesting there was nothing much happening in the UK or American cinema) authors Cathal Tohill and Peter Tombs (in Immoral Tales: Sex and Horror Cinema in Europe 1956 – 1984) pointed out, quite rightly, that the flood gates had been opened to new cinematic possibilities at this key time.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the European horror film went totally crazy. It began to go kinky, creating a new type of cinema that blended eroticism and horror. This heady fusion was highly successful, causing a tidal wave of celluloid weirdness that was destined to look even more shocking and irrational when it hits countries like England the USA (1994: 155).
This is not to draw a line in the sand and suggest that anything before was half-formed, incomplete or that the genre (and its various subgenres and cross pollinations) spent years in some sort of unimaginative wasteland before discovering its true purpose and growing up proper. Movies do not exist in a vacuum nor do they arrive by Immaculate Conception! It could be argued, too, that film-makers under strict studio/producer guidelines and various codes of screen conduct had more of a challenge, and therefore fun, inserting or insinuating transgressive themes or weird beats into hack jobs than having carte blanche as film creatives do today. If it was true that the genre (though not as easily defined as a distinct ‘type’ we would often like) was some backwater creek before 1960, how to explain something like Freaks (1932). A film produced by MGM, the grandest and richest studio of old Hollywood.
The big screen has always illuminated the dark realities of our world. James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932) dared to probe generational conflict and insanity. He masked it as an eccentric farce. The character Horace Femm (played wonderfully by Ernest Thesiger) and his irrational fear of fetching a lamp from the house’s upper landing is a striking piece of psychological terror that foreshadows all sorts of modern horror avenues. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), perhaps too avant garde for popular taste and a flop on release, is a startlingly zonked-out motion picture discussed today quite rightly as a masterpiece. In the 1940s, producer Val Lewton’s films with director Jacques Tourneur ingeniously presented the haunted mind with trick photography and shadows. Another incredibly mad film produced during the initial American craze for horror films was Erle Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls (1932). A literary adaptation of a prestigious author’s work, it demonstrated a fine capacity to disturb both studio executives and the audience. Forget all about entertainment and art for a second – it made viewers feel something other than a traditional fright. There is something not quite right about Freaks and Island of Lost Souls, despite their forward-thinking tolerance to errors of the human body and sexual frankness: whether that’s a wealthy circus midget marrying a capricious Russian beauty or a hero getting the horn for a sexy panther lady (played by the comely Kathleen Burke), in the latter. If only Dr. Moreau (Charles Laughton) had been attentive enough to have manicured Lota’s furry panther hands!
A CERTAIN SENSE OF DECLINE
Genres and their popularity move in cycles. For one to revise its rules and appeal there must be a certain sense of decline to have occurred or – at the very least – a lull. Into the late 1940s and 1950s, a few years after two atomic bombs (Fat Man and Little Boy) were dropped on Japanese cities, though horror movies were still being made, sci-fi flicks (with aliens from outer space threatening our earthly extinction) became king.
Creature Features and political paranoia collided. Movies with Gothic figures were being produced, for sure, but they bore titles such as Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1952) and I was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957). In works such as The Thing from Another World (1953), The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) or the 1954 novel by Richard Matheson, I Am Legend, the vampire-like traits of the monsters presented apocalyptic jeopardy, far from the Gothic incarnation made popular in the 1920s and 1930s. However, sex and death and violence would return in a more virulent and brazenly explicit fashion thanks to Hammer Films and others.