Amazing really what you can achieve with coloured lights, smoke machines, cobwebs and a zoom lens. Exhibit A: Mario Bava’s classic Kill, Baby… Kill! which goes by a whole host of names – Operazione Paura (literally Operation Fear) in the original Italian, and Orgy of the Living Dead, Curse of the Dead and Curse of the Living Dead in different countries at different times.
What makes this prime chunk of Italian horror a classic is not its horror content – there’s nothing really here for the hounds – but its looks. Bava followed his father, a camera operator in the silent era, into the movie business but he had originally trained as a painter. It’s a painter’s eye he brings to this film, every moment of which has framing, composition and, most of all, colour as its primary focus.
A coroner arrives in a remote Carpathian village and gets the standard silent treatment from the villagers, a superstitious bunch of yokels. Then sets to work investigating the death of a woman last seen throwing herself onto an iron paling against her own will before the opening credits. The yokels are not happy about the coroner’s presence. There will be trouble, they say. They are not wrong.
Before long, Dr Paul Eswai (Giacomo Rossi Stuart), with fellow men of reason Inspector Kruger (Piero Lulli) and Burgomeister Karl (Luciano Catenacci), is up to his neck in it. There is more death – involuntary – and the finger seems to point towards local aristocrat Baroness Graps (Giovanna Galletti) and, say the locals, her undead daughter Melissa (Valerio Valeri).
Bava gives us a trio of colour-coded women to offset the ugliness – blonde Monica (Erika Blanc), who becomes Eswai’s fretful assistant, red-headed Nadienne (Micaela Esdra), the innkeeper’s superstitious daughter, and raven-haired Ruth (Fabienne Dali), a woman versed in the old ways.
Since the women are all easy on the eye you might expect some romance for tall, handsome and well dressed Dr Paul. But Bava is not interested in romance, or plot, or character come to that. Instead everything comes a distant second to mood, which Bava conjures with carefully arranged sets and lighting design that is pools of colour set amid pools of shadow. This film is luxuriantly gothic, almost psychedelically so at times. And while Bava isn’t out to re-invent the wheel in terms of storytelling, he does innovate in the figure of the Baroness’s creepy spirit-daughter, a saucer-eyed kid whose appearance on the scene with her white ball means imminent death for somebody.
She’s a disturbing presence, partly because Bava has cast a boy to play a girl, partly because Valerio Valeri does spooky rather well. The red-coated child in Don’t Look Now, the twins in The Shining and, most explicitly, the girl with the white ball in Fellini’s Spirits of the Dead all owe this film something.
Hysteria lurks. Sex is suggested but never happens. Women clutch at themselves. Lips are parted. There is moaning and mussing of hair. Tops slip as if bosoms are about to be revealed. The sublimation of desire sits in the background as a possible alternative explanation for the deaths.
As said, coloured lights, smoke machines, cobwebs and a zoom lens, which Bava uses extensively to indicate moments of high emotion – in out, in out. He’s achieving huge amounts with very little. The money ran out and so cast and crew worked on the film without pay. It was shot in no time at all – 12 days said Bava, 20 said co-star Blanc, four weeks said Bava’s son, Lamberto, who worked on the film as assistant director. Maybe they’re all right and are including different stages of post-production in their totals.
Lack of cash also meant that stock music was the source of music. Carlo Rustichelli is credited as composer because a lot of his library work was used. It’s surprisingly effective in summoning the mood of increasing paranoia. But then it is a surprisingly effective film in every sense. Not Bava’s most famous film, that’s probably Black Sabbath (not least because it’s where the band got their name) but a perfect distillation of what makes him a horror legend.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
