It may be wild for the contemporary horror cinephile to consider the bounty of stylish gothic cinema that was available in the 1960s. There was the cycle of horror films from Hammer Studios, which specialized in lurid and atmospheric covers of the Universal Studios monster titles, among others. There was Roger Corman’s extraordinary series of Edgar Allan Poe riffs with Vincent Price, which are more daring and free-associative than the Hammer pictures and as beautiful to behold with their ravishing Technicolor. There was also the cinema of Mario Bava, which is more inspirational to future artists than is often acknowledged.
Thanks to the 30th James River Film Festival, audiences new and old can get a taste of two of the maestro’s signature works at the Byrd on Saturday, April 20. Kicking off the Mario Bava double feature at 5 p.m. is 1960’s “Black Sunday,” which launched the international careers of the filmmaker and his lead, Barbara Steele.
The opening of “Black Sunday” illustrates how Bava upends and honors the conventions of the Universal monster movies at once. The 17th century prologue finds Princess Asa (Steele) being executed by her brother for the crimes of being a witch and vampire. The terms are used interchangeably throughout the film, but Asa is more or less what we think of as a vampire, and she vows revenge as an iron mask with spikes on its inside is pounded by a large hammer into her face before she’s tied up and burned at the stake. This is the pre-credits sequence, which is to say that Bava offers a very graphic scene for its time up as a macabre amuse bouche. He isn’t kidding around.
At the same time, the film abounds in old-school pleasures — the pleasures of fastidiously dressed gothic sets cloaked in impeccable and poetic deep, dark shadows brought into even starker prominence by the black-and-white cinematography. There are also the pleasures of hokey narrative tropes. In the 19th century, when most of the film is set, and when Asa will (of course) be inadvertently awoken from a death that’s really more of a slumber, there will be talk of curses, and doctors will bumble around attempting to explain happenings that are beyond their literal-minded pay grade. Steele will surface in this timeline as Katia, and it never pays to be the doppelganger of a powerful agent of the undead bent on returning to human form. The plot of the film is basically “Dracula,” or at least “Dracula” as it’s typically interpreted for cinema.
The modernity of “Black Sunday” comes from the violence, which peaks early on, and the aura of sexual repression, which runs through the film like a fine electric current. There’s never any speechifying about the sexual fears and biases that led to persecutions of women of witchcraft in real life, but this texture is in Steele’s performance. Asa is a modern woman with an overpoweringly carnal aura, and her orgasmic rasps link her desire for resurrection explicitly to a hunger for sexual fulfillment. Bava and Steele never overdo this subtext: it’s just there, understood plainly for those willing to understand it. Steele brings to mind Boris Karloff’s performance in Karl Freund’s “The Mummy,” which is not the typical bandaged mummy of your imagination. He is a poignant, virile creature with a background of tragedy that brings about a purgatory of longing. Steele conjures a similar mixture of power and pathos.
The second film of the Bava double feature, starting at 7 p.m., is more visionary: 1966’s “Kill, Baby … Kill!” It is a fever dream of ripe, lurid colors and camera movements that seem motivated less by the requirements of narrative than of the characters’ psychologies. As critic and Mario Bava expert Tim Lucas says in his notes, David Lynch’s work seems unimaginable without this film, especially one particularly creepy sequence in which the protagonist seems to chase himself in an endless temporal loop in a castle. That scene is replicated to a minute degree of detail in Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me,” and there are many looser variations of it throughout Lynch’s work.
The pervading aura in“Kill, Baby … Kill!” of sickness, neuroses, and of buried communal trauma and evil, is very much of a piece with Lynch as well. Like the town of Twin Peaks, the early 19th century village of Bava’s film is haunted by the death of a girl, in this case a very young girl, who is said to linger among the streets and the graveyard. Her laugh, which is bone-chilling, can be heard in recurrence like a leitmotif, and the sight of her is said to inspire people to suicide. As in “Black Sunday,” Bava stages his goriest scene at the beginning, as a woman plunges out of a window to impalement on an iron fence. That death casts a pall over a film that’s haunted by bitterness and dread.
In the premium that it places on mood and sublimated emotions above narrative, “Kill, Baby … Kill!” is reminiscent of the most unhinged of the Corman Poe films, especially “The Pit and the Pendulum,” (which features Steele), “Tomb of Ligeia,” and “The Masque of the Red Death.” Bava goes even further off into the subjective deep end though. There are images in “Kill, Baby … Kill!” of extravagant eeriness, including what may be the greatest shot of a spiral staircase in horror and noir, as it suggests nothing less than a portal to a diseased realm. The little girl, who may be a manifestation of communal hysteria, is among cinema’s great phantoms, especially when she’s reaching her small, thin hands up to a window, beckoning one toward the coldness. Some of these images were clearly on Stephen King’s mind when he wrote “Salem’s Lot.”
Bava would continue to exert a powerful, under-acknowledged influence on cinema. A point-of-view shot of the little girl on a swing in “Kill, Baby…Kill” anticipates the giallo movement that was just around the corner, which Bava had already anticipated with my favorite of his films, 1964’s “Blood and Black Lace.” Meanwhile, 1971’s “A Bay of Blood” sets the template for the American slasher film, which of course already has its roots in giallo. Bava’s craftsmanship in these classics, particularly his use of color, suggests the missing link between multiple forms of 1960s and 1970s-era horror movies, as well as the poetry of the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, especially “The Red Shoes,” which is a favorite of Martin Scorsese. And it was no less than Scorsese who wrote the introduction to Tim Lucas’s massive book, “Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark.”
It’s a small world in the land of horror cinema. Or a temporal loop.
The 30th annual James River Film Festival runs from April 11 through the 14, as well as on April 20th. For more information, you can check the festival’s site at https://www.jamesriverfilm.org/.