Initially setting out to merely create a forum by which to work with Laura Betti, Mario Bava navigated around a cramped shooting schedule and minuscule budget to make one of the most vital, influential films in the history of the genre. As such, though not his masterpiece, A Bay of Blood is, in many respects, the Godfather of Italian Gore’s signature feature. Of course, given that the pen behind many of Lucio Fulci’s masterpieces, Dardano Sacchetti, opens the work with over nine minutes of silence, we should thus expect something out of the ordinary to follow.
More readily identified as Twitch of the Death Nerve, Bava’s film would set the groundwork for the whole of the Slasher Era, moreso than even Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Whereas the latter’s antagonist is given a psychological motive for his homicidal rage, Bava’s, cough, villain is not driven, but thematically lured, by immorality. Ironically, though A Bay of Blood harbors the leitmotif of voyeurism in much the same manner as Psycho, it is the structure of the terror contained within that sets the film apart from its predecessor and allows it to be freely homaged in the ensuing decades.
Bava’s narrative is the first true slasher feature in the respect that its many distinctive traits have become standard and, for many lay American viewers with little knowledge of the genre outside of their native shores, trademarks for the subgenre. Much like the common clichés which we slowly discover to have originated with Shakespeare, the subjective POV of the killer, best known as the calling card in John Carpenter’s Halloween, is first evidenced in A Bay of Blood as we remember Sean Cunningham and his seemingly countless derivatives bearing the locale of a lake getaway, which will become the resting place for coital victims by way of a spear, all of which begins with Bava’s tale. Furthermore, Wes Craven’s impressionability is two-fold in respect to his Italian forerunner for A Nightmare on Elm Street’s color scheme, green and red, is present in Bava’s production, as is the revelatory finale of the 1971 feature, which the American auteur would echo in his “groundbreaking” satire a quarter century later in Scream, which becomes historically ironic for A Bay of Blood was retitled Last House on the Left II when initially released in America.
What is perhaps more remarkable than the fact that Bava not only succeeds in creating a film, any film, on such a small budget, but one which would serve to mold the genre in its wake, is–amid filming tracking shots with a child’s wagon–that he posits one of the first morality tales in horror as death looms only in the presence of sin. As the greed for possession of inherited land leads to one death after another (an overwhelming, unheard of total of thirteen in 1971), the viewer is obligated to nod in appreciation for the director not only removes the horror film from its otherwise nihilistic roots, but prefaces his plot with a discussion upon the ethical consequences of death (the literal translation of the film’s title is “The Ecology of a Crime”). Thus, though the result of greed remains constant, we pause to consider if the degree of culpability differs in that motives vary in severity throughout. Regardless of our conclusion, the audience is met by a gratuitous, but nonetheless poetic, finale as Bava triumphs with his theme wherein, a year prior with Five Dolls for an August Moon, he failed so miserably.
Though critics lambasted the work as they would the film’s effigies a decade later solely on grounds of the violence and gore being too visceral, Bava’s hyperreal, unflinching camera, though its proclivity to zoom at every given moment becomes somewhat obtrusive, rendered special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi–who would be responsible for Steven Spielberg’s character of E.T.–the award for Best Makeup and Special Effects at the Avoriaz Film Festival. It is with this that the viewer is left to contend with one of the most harrowing visuals in all of horror cinema wherein an octopus meets a corpse as, likewise, one of the most grueling deaths set to celluloid challenges the Master of Suspense’s strenuous duels witnessed in his later efforts.
Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood, though not a great work of art can nonetheless not be flippantly dismissed for it paved the way for countless lesser and, yes, greater efforts as it changed the genre. Cleverly, where the film lacks in plot and character, it readily compensates for in ingenuity, thereby standing as, again, yet another unforgettable Bava film.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
