Movies
Kill of the Week: Double Penetration in ‘Bay of Blood’
Every week, we spotlight a kill that we just can’t get enough of. This is Kill of the Week.
Masterpieces like Halloween and Friday the 13th may have popularized the slasher sub-genre, but the origin tale of the body count film dates back many years prior. Bob Clark’s Black Christmas directly paved the way for Halloween, for example, while many consider Hitchcock’s Psycho to be the first true slasher film.
And then there’s Italian filmmaker Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood (aka Twitch of the Death Nerve), unquestionably one of the earliest and most influential slashers of them all.
In the 1971 film, which predates Friday the 13th by nine years, the body count rises in the wake of a rich countess being murdered, setting off a race to see who’ll inherit her estate. The gory mayhem found in the movie was very uncommon at the time; watching it back today, it’s clear that it laid down the blueprint for the American slasher film.
Of particular note, Bay of Blood was completely ripped off ten years after its release by 1981’s Friday the 13th Part 2. Two of the standout moments of brutality in Bava’s film were directly copied by the second installment of the Friday franchise, including one wherein the killer whacks a machete directly into the face of an unlucky man.
And then there’s the double slaying of a young man and woman who are speared in bed while having sex. The killer slams the spear into the woman’s back, driving it straight through both of their bodies and into the floor below. They both briefly writhe in pain before dying, spending their final moments cruelly joined together by the spear.
The kill in Friday Part 2 plays out almost exactly the same way (though the man is on top this time around), right down to the tip of the spear slamming into the floor.
Bava passed away in 1980, never knowing just how influential Bay of Blood was.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
You must be logged in to post a comment.