Editorials
Brutal Beauty: Mario Bava’s ‘Blood and Black Lace’ at 60
It’s no secret that horror too often elicits kneejerk reactions from narrow-minded critics who, for some reason or another, aren’t willing to give its particular brand of storytelling a fair shake. There are countless examples of films that have received lukewarm to scathing critiques from reviewers upon their release only to be embraced as classics years later, sometimes even by the same writers that originally did them dirty. Last House on the Left (1972), The Shining (1980) and, perhaps most famously, The Thing (1982) were all savaged for various reasons during their initial runs but are now not only thought of as staples of their genre but of cinema as a whole.
This was also the case for Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964). Barely making a splash with audiences and critics alike when it was released in Italy 60 years ago this month, the picture’s impact would soon be gargantuan. It would help birth the modern day giallo film, inspire the visions of countless filmmakers both nationally and abroad, and deeply influence the slasher genre. But even divorced from these accolades, Blood and Black Lace stands on its own as one Bava’s best efforts (which is saying something considering the width and breadth of his incredible career).
As many fans can attest, plot is rarely of importance in most gialli. However, here’s a brief summary of Blood and Black Lace’s for the uninitiated. Murder is afoot at Christian Haute Couture! A masked figure clad in a trench coat, fedora, and black leather gloves is gruesomely slaying the Italian fashion house’s models, and his motives are as mysterious as his garb. Local police are helpless to stop the butcheries, but are certain of one thing: the killer walks among the glamourous women he so sickeningly dispatches. Who is he, and when will his reign of terror end?
While not the first film to fall under the giallo banner (most agree that title should be given to an earlier Mario Bava picture, 1963’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much), so many of the genre’s defining elements originated with Blood and Black Lace that you’d be forgiven for thinking the distinction belongs to it. The characteristics that spring to mind when thinking of the genre are out in full force. Beyond the obvious, like the killer’s black gloved hands, there’s the less apparent trademarks. We see the shrugging-off of the rational in favour of a more surreal viewing experience, a feature seen in many gialli. This is most evident in how we see through the lens of the camera. It creeps along, almost cat-like, and often confuses you in terms of whose perspective is being presented. Tied to this is the way color is used in how scenes are lit. Lighting gels with rich tones were utilized throughout, especially during the scenes taking place at night. These visual cues signal to the audience’s subconscious that the world being presented to them is askew somehow, leading to a sense of unease rising within.
Other times this dreamlike nature is found in the film’s narrative, with the characters’ motivations and actions appearing to lack any sort of logic. This disorients the audience, leaving them to wonder if anyone in the story is truly who they say they are. As Ian Olney puts it in his book Euro Horror: Classic European Cinema in Contemporary American Culture, Bava “toys mercilessly with viewers, inviting them to make certain assumptions or take certain positions vis-à-vis the unfolding story and its characteristics, only to pull the rug out from under again and again.”
These stylistic choices of Bava’s influenced countless filmmakers both within the boarders of Italy and elsewhere. In the States, his shadow can be seen in the works of directors like Martin Scorsese, John Carpenter, and Tim Burton, while Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento both owe a large portion of their careers to the path Mario paved. Argento’s work in particular is almost a continuation of Bava’s own, as if there were a passing of the baton of sorts between the Maestro and the Italian Hitchcock. That moment could be best illustrated by their partnership during the filming of Inferno, the second entry in Argento’s Mother of Tears trilogy. Stricken ill during its production, he invited Bava to help with the creation of the film’s optical effects (a technique Mario was a master of) and assist in some second unit directing. It was, as Dario put it years later, “a sort of affectionate collaboration.”
Since Blood and Black Lace played such a pivotal role in the creation of the giallo film, it’s easy to draw a line from Bava’s classic to the conception of the modern-day slasher flick. Visually they obviously share much common ground. Take their lethal antagonists, for instance. While Blood and Black Lace was not the first movie to feature a killer with a hidden visage (that would be the 1962 shocker, Terrified) its villain’s appearance looks more in the vein of what we would see years later in the stalk-and-slash pictures of the 80’s and 90’s. Terrified’s assassin wears a boring old balaclava, while Bava’s butcher has what appears to be a white stocking over his face. The former’s choice of disguise hides the identity, but the latter’s lends him an eerie, almost otherworldly quality that would go on to be the standard for masked murderers years later.
Of course, the strength in the bond between gialli and slashers is more in blood than anything else. Both genres are built around the employment of elaborate and hyper-violent death scenes. The best of these set pieces are finely crafted works of art that build tension and dread until erupting into either a geyser of gore or, as is the case with films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the implication of a tremendous bloodletting. Blood and Black Lace’s kills, though somewhat tame by today’s standards, were absolutely vicious for their time and feature all the hallmarks of what we’d see later in the slasher.
All of these bits of historical significance are wonderful, but how important a movie is does not always make for something that’s enjoyable to watch. Thankfully, if you were to strip away all of that, you’d still be left with one hell of a gorgeous and entertaining film. Its opulent set and costume design, hypnotic camera work, expressionistic use of color, and nightmarish set-pieces all come together to make the kind of cinematic experience that makes you happy to have eyeballs in your skull.
It’s a fitting testament to the legacy of a legendary filmmaker and his masterwork.
Soon after the New Hollywood generation took over the entertainment industry, they started having children. And more than any filmmakers that came before—they were terrified. Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976), Eraserhead (1977), The Brood (1979), The Shining (1980), Possession (1981), and many others all deal, at least in part, with the fears of becoming or being a parent. What if my child turns out to be a monster? is corrupted by some evil force? or turns out to be the fucking Antichrist? What if I screw them up somehow, or can’t help them, or even go insane and try to kill them? Horror has always been at its best when exploring relatable fears through extreme circumstances. A prime example of this is Larry Cohen’s 1974 monster-baby movie It’s Alive, which explores the not only the rollercoaster of emotions that any parent experiences when confronted with the difficulties of raising a child, but long-standing questions of who or what is at fault when something goes horribly wrong.
Cohen begins making his underlying points early in the film as Frank Davis (John P. Ryan) discusses the state of the world with a group of expectant fathers in a hospital waiting room. They discuss the “overabundance of lead” in foods and the environment, smog, and pesticides that only serve to produce roaches that are “bigger, stronger, and harder to kill.” Frank comments that this is “quite a world to bring a kid into.” This has long been a discussion point among people when trying to decide whether to have kids or not. I’ve had many conversations with friends who have said they feel it’s irresponsible to bring children into such a violent, broken, and dangerous world, and I certainly don’t begrudge them this. My wife and I did decide to have children but that doesn’t mean that it’s been easy.
Immediately following this scene comes It’s Alive’s most famous sequence in which Frank’s wife Lenore (Sharon Farrell) is the only person left alive in her delivery room, the doctors clawed and bitten to death by her mutant baby, which has escaped. “What does my baby look like!? What’s wrong with my baby!?” she screams as nurses wheel her frantically into a recovery room. The evening that had begun with such joy and excitement at the birth of their second child turned into a nightmare. This is tough for me to write, but on some level, I can relate to this whiplash of emotion. When my second child was born, they came about five weeks early. I’ll use the pronouns “they/them” for privacy reasons when referring to my kids. Our oldest was still very young and went to stay with my parents and we sped off to the hospital where my wife was taken into an operating room for an emergency c-section. I was able to carry our newborn into the NICU (natal intensive care unit) where I was assured that this was routine for all premature births. The nurses assured me there was nothing to worry about and the baby looked big and healthy. I headed to where my wife was taken to recover to grab a few winks assuming that everything was fine. Well, when I awoke, I headed back over to the NICU to find that my child was not where I left them. The nurse found me and told me that the baby’s lungs were underdeveloped, and they had to put them in a special room connected to oxygen tubes and wires to monitor their vitals.
It’s difficult to express the fear that overwhelmed me in those moments. Everything turned out okay, but it took a while and I’m convinced to this day that their anxiety struggles spring from these first weeks of life. As our children grew, we learned that two of the three were on the spectrum and that anxiety, depression, ADHD, and OCD were also playing a part in their lives. Parents, at least speaking for myself, can’t help but blame themselves for the struggles their children face. The “if only” questions creep in and easily overcome the voices that assure us that it really has nothing to do with us. In the film, Lenore says, “maybe it’s all the pills I’ve been taking that brought this on.” Frank muses aloud about how he used to think that Frankenstein was the monster, but when he got older realized he was the one that made the monster. The aptly named Frank is wondering if his baby’s mutation is his fault, if he created the monster that is terrorizing Los Angeles. I have made plenty of “if only” statements about myself over the years. “If only I hadn’t had to work so much, if only I had been around more when they were little.” Mothers may ask themselves, “did I have a drink, too much coffee, or a cigarette before I knew I was pregnant? Was I too stressed out during the pregnancy?” In other words, most parents can’t help but wonder if it’s all their fault.
At one point in the film, Frank goes to the elementary school where his baby has been sighted and is escorted through the halls by police. He overhears someone comment about “screwed up genes,” which brings about age-old questions of nature vs. nurture. Despite the voices around him from doctors and detectives that say, “we know this isn’t your fault,” Frank can’t help but think it is, and that the people who try to tell him it isn’t really think it’s his fault too. There is no doubt that there is a hereditary element to the kinds of mental illness struggles that my children and I deal with. But, and it’s a bit but, good parenting goes a long way in helping children deal with these struggles. Kids need to know they’re not alone, a good parent can provide that, perhaps especially parents that can relate to the same kinds of struggles. The question of nature vs. nurture will likely never be entirely answered but I think there’s more than a good chance that “both/and” is the case. Around the midpoint of the film, Frank agrees to disown the child and sign it over for medical experimentation if caught or killed. Lenore and the older son Chris (Daniel Holzman) seek to nurture and teach the baby, feeling that it is not a monster, but a member of the family.
It’s Alive takes these ideas to an even greater degree in the fact that the Davis Baby really is a monster, a mutant with claws and fangs that murders and eats people. The late ’60s and early ’70s also saw the rise in mass murderers and serial killers which heightened the nature vs. nurture debate. Obviously, these people were not literal monsters but human beings that came from human parents, but something had gone horribly wrong. Often the upbringing of these killers clearly led in part to their antisocial behavior, but this isn’t always the case. It’s Alive asks “what if a ‘monster’ comes from a good home?” In this case is it society, environmental factors, or is it the lead, smog, and pesticides? It is almost impossible to know, but the ending of the film underscores an uncomfortable truth—even monsters have parents.
As the film enters its third act, Frank joins the hunt for his child through the Los Angeles sewers and into the L.A. River. He is armed with a rifle and ready to kill on sight, having divorced himself from any relationship to the child. Then Frank finds his baby crying in the sewers and his fatherly instincts take over. With tears in his eyes, he speaks words of comfort and wraps his son in his coat. He holds him close, pats and rocks him, and whispers that everything is going to be okay. People often wonder how the parents of those who perform heinous acts can sit in court, shed tears, and defend them. I think it’s a complex issue. I’m sure that these parents know that their child has done something evil, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are still their baby. Your child is a piece of yourself formed into a whole new human being. Disowning them would be like cutting off a limb, no matter what they may have done. It doesn’t erase an evil act, far from it, but I can understand the pain of a parent in that situation. I think It’s Alive does an exceptional job placing its audience in that situation.
Despite the serious issues and ideas being examined in the film, It’s Alive is far from a dour affair. At heart, it is still a monster movie and filled with a sense of fun and a great deal of pitch-black humor. In one of its more memorable moments, a milkman is sucked into the rear compartment of his truck as red blood mingles with the white milk from smashed bottles leaking out the back of the truck and streaming down the street. Just after Frank agrees to join the hunt for his baby, the film cuts to the back of an ice cream truck with the words “STOP CHILDREN” emblazoned on it. It’s a movie filled with great kills, a mutant baby—created by make-up effects master Rick Baker early in his career, and plenty of action—and all in a PG rated movie! I’m telling you, the ’70s were wild. It just also happens to have some thoughtful ideas behind it as well.
Which was Larry Cohen’s specialty. Cohen made all kinds of movies, but his most enduring have been his horror films and all of them tackle the social issues and fears of the time they were made. God Told Me To (1976), Q: The Winged Serpent (1982), and The Stuff (1985) are all great examples of his socially aware, low-budget, exploitation filmmaking with a brain and It’s Alive certainly fits right in with that group. Cohen would go on to write and direct two sequels, It Lives Again (aka It’s Alive 2) in 1978 and It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive in 1987 and is credited as a co-writer on the 2008 remake. All these films explore the ideas of parental responsibility in light of the various concerns of the times they were made including abortion rights and AIDS.
Fifty years after It’s Alive was initially released, it has only become more relevant in the ensuing years. Fears surrounding parenthood have been with us since the beginning of time but as the years pass the reasons for these fears only seem to become more and more profound. In today’s world the conversation of the fathers in the waiting room could be expanded to hormones and genetic modifications in food, terrorism, climate change, school and other mass shootings, and other threats that were unknown or at least less of a concern fifty years ago. Perhaps the fearmongering conspiracy theories about chemtrails and vaccines would be mentioned as well, though in a more satirical fashion, as fears some expectant parents encounter while endlessly doomscrolling Facebook or Twitter. Speaking for myself, despite the struggles, the fears, and the sadness that sometimes comes with having children, it’s been worth it. The joys ultimately outweigh all of that, but I understand the terror too. Becoming a parent is no easy choice, nor should it be. But as I look back, I can say that I’m glad we made the choice we did.
I wonder if Frank and Lenore can say the same thing.
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