Film Review: 'Blood and Black Lace (1964)': Bava's Masterpiece

Blood And Black Lace (1964), directed by Mario Bava; starring Cameron Mitchell, Eva Bartok, Thomas Reiner, and Mary Arden.

To be honest, as a horror fan,I never really “got” the great Italian horrormeister Mario Bava, until I saw Blood and Black Lace. His famous b&w gothic films, like Black Sunday (1960), don’t affect me the way this film does. I think Bava — a former fine arts painter—had to film in color before truly coming into his own.

Blood and Black Lace is often billed as the very first “giallo”, an Italian film genre that usually combines suspense, gore, scandals, and sexy ladies in a crime thriller or horror storyline. It’s also considered Bava's ultimate masterpiece, although fans of Black Sunday may disagree.

Fifties B-movie actor Cameron Mitchell heads a cast of mostly Italian/Continental stock players in a story about models who work for a fancy fashion house in Rome. A mysterious masked man is picking them off one by one in brutal ways. The MacGuffin that drives the plot is a secret diary kept by one of the girls.

Yes, the storyline is rather thin and trite, and the dubbing for the English-language version is iffy, but nobody watches a Bava film for the plot or the acting. No, we watch for the inimitable Bava style, the colors, the suspense sequences, the costumes, and the best chiaroscuro images since the Renaissance master Caravaggio.

Bava absolutely drenches this film in riotous color, most especially a brilliant shade of cardinal red, which he manages to include in almost every scene. There are red telephones, red draperies, red dress mannequins, red flower arrangements. Bava even puts Mitchell in a bright red patterned weskit for the final sequence. The use of red obviously influenced Dario Argento’s legendary red-drenched horror film, Suspiria (1977).

In addition to picking out red everywhere, Bava’s artful camera also lingers uncomfortably on the death scenes of the models, some of which are particularly sadistic. One model is beaten, strangled, and tortured with a hot stove. Another girl is stalked through a darkened, cluttered antiques store in an epically suspenseful game of cat-and-mouse. Still another girl is drowned in a bathroom sink while dressed only in her white lace undies—fairly daring for 1964.

The amazing cinematography is credited to Uboldo Terano, but as is usual, Bava shot a lot of the footage himself, uncredited. Carlo Rustichelli wrote the very Sixties score, which features plenty of jazzy, seductive brass instruments; he also scored Bava’s earlier gothic, The Whip and the Body (1963), starring Christopher Lee.

Blood and Black Lace is streaming on US Amazon Prime as of this writing.