From the Cheap Seats

One of the great ironies of DVD is how marginal figures from film history often get the deluxe bells-and-whistles treatment while more illustrious titles get dumped in shoddy barebones editions. It’s a thought that occurred to me as I perused the new Mario Bava set (coming soon to region two). (Volume 1 is already available.)

I suppose Bava is best described as a ‘cult’ director. He’s most famous for low-budget horror movies but he also turned out Viking films, sword and sandal ‘epics’, science fiction, spaghetti westerns – even a sex farce. Basically, he spent his career making whatever Italian producers thought they could sell. No wonder the critics ignored him during his career.

But all that makes him sound like a hack, which he certainly wasn’t. Bava bought something to those films that makes them more memorable than many more prestigious projects. He came to directing late, after a long career as a cameraman and special effects artist (special effects artists often make useful directors, but that’s another subject for another time). He used this technical expertise not just to transcend his minuscule budgets but to make his films look like nothing else out there.

A good place to start is his official debut The Mask of Satan / Black Sunday (all Bava’s films are blessed with a multitude of titles). It boasts some of the most beautiful black and white photography there’s ever been, all looming shadows and suggestive darkness. After I first saw it, I rushed to discover all I could about Bava: I was devastated to learn he only made one further black and white film. I’d hoped for a career’s worth of monochrome beauty.

Yet, if anything, his colour films are even more spectacular. Bava’s use of colour is up there with Michael Powell, Vincent Minnelli or Sergai Paradjanov. They’re psychedelic kaleidoscopes, where colour is used to reflect emotions and to heighten atmosphere.

And what atmosphere! These are films far more about mood or ambience than plot or character. He loved to track his camera around derelict castles or decaying mansions. Events which other directors might have shown in a couple of shots are extended into full scale set-pieces, such as when a corpse digs itself out of the grave in Mask of the Demon, or a child plays on a swing in Kill Baby, Kill! (The other thing about the English-language titles is that they are almost all universally awful.)

Bava was an unpretentious man, who disparaged talk of ‘artistry’ but there’s much more to his films than technical mastery. His films are far more savage than other films of the period and not just with their censor-baiting whippings and brandings. Bava’s world is a dark place, full of twisted eroticism and outright sadism. Good never defeats evil outright, and sometimes not at all. It’s a sharp contrast to the home counties morality of Hammer films which supposedly inspired Bava.

Despite his considerable achievements, I doubt Bava will ever really leave the cult ghetto. Even his admirers have to admit that his films can be an acquired taste, one that involves a certain tolerance for dodgy plotting and (occasionally) sluggish pacing. He’s perhaps best regarded as an Italian Edgar G Ulmer, another director who was obliged to make bricks without straw. Bava never made anything quite as blistering as Ulmer’s Detour but this essential set shows us how close he came.