Blood and Black Lace (1964)
By 1964, Italian genre cinema was operating in a world of its own, producing work that bore little resemblance to what Hollywood or the British studios were turning out. Blood and Black Lace sits at the centre of that moment, a film that helped crystallise the giallo as a recognisable form: lurid, stylish, morally unanchored crime-horror built around elaborate murders, hidden secrets and an atmosphere thick enough to cut. The word "giallo" simply means yellow, a reference to the yellow-spined pulp crime novels that were popular in Italy from the 1930s onwards, and the genre they gave their name to borrowed their transgressive energy and ran hard with it. For a companion piece from a director who pushed the form into even more extreme territory a few years later, see also Don't Torture a Duckling, and I also covered Bava's own follow-up to this kind of material in A Bay of Blood, a film that takes a similarly cold eye to human vice and wraps it in equally lurid packaging.
The film was a co-production spread across Italy, France and Germany, with production companies including Emmepi Cinematografica, Monachia Film, Les Productions Georges de Beauregard and Top-Film all involved, the kind of European patchwork financing that was common for genre pictures of the era and that gave directors like Bava a degree of creative latitude that a more conventional studio structure might not have allowed. The screenplay came from Bava himself alongside Giuseppe Barilla and Marcello Fondato, and the premise is tidily constructed: a young model at a Roman fashion house is murdered by a masked, faceless killer, her diary containing the vices and secrets of everyone in the building goes missing, and the bodies begin to pile up as the killer works through the cast hunting for it. It is, in outline, a conventional murder mystery, but Bava was never really interested in the conventional when he could do something stranger and more visually arresting instead.
The cast is headed by Cameron Mitchell and Eva Bartok, both of them polished but unremarkable presences who serve the film's purposes well enough. Mitchell had worked steadily in Hollywood through the 1950s before moving into European genre work, while Bartok brought a cool, mannered quality that suited the film's heightened world of fashion and performance. Thomas Reiner, Ariana Gorini and Dante DiPaolo fill out the ensemble, a collection of faces attached to secrets, each one a potential victim or suspect in roughly equal measure.
What distinguishes the film most immediately is the way it looks and sounds. Bava shared cinematography duties with Ubaldo Terzano, and the two of them produced images that remain startling even now: deep, unnatural colour washes that flood the frame in reds and greens and blues, shadows that seem almost architectural, and a camera that moves with a predatory patience quite unlike the functional coverage of most genre pictures of the period. Carlo Rustichelli's score is worth noting too, a piece of work that balances romantic melodrama against something more unsettled, the two moods kept in deliberate tension throughout. The editing by Mario Serandrei, who had worked with Visconti and was one of the most experienced cutters in Italian cinema, keeps the pace controlled without sacrificing the film's essential strangeness. One specific point of interest: Bava's decision to stage the killings with almost choreographic formality, holding shots rather than cutting away, was a conscious choice that made the violence feel ritual rather than chaotic, a quality that would become one of the giallo's defining characteristics.
There is nothing else in cinema quite like a giallo, as I found myself explaining to my wife while we watched this.
It is not quite horror, not quite thriller, not quite drama, but a vibrant, atmospheric melodrama all of its own, and Blood and Black Lace is one of the films that laid down the template. Mario Bava turns a masked, faceless killer loose in a Roman fashion house, stalking and murdering its models one by one, and in doing so more or less invents the stalking-slasher picture years before Hollywood got round to the idea.
We have worked through a fair few of these now, from Bava and Dario Argento to Lucio Fulci, and the thing that always gets me is the look. There is simply nothing visually like a sixties or seventies giallo, all lurid, saturated colour and deep shadow, and this is a gorgeous example of the form. The killer is a wonderful creation, at once entirely human and somehow supernatural; there is plenty of suspense and the odd well-staged jump; and the score makes a fine accompaniment to all that style.
It has aged, mind, and not always gracefully. We could see the wire on one of the gags a beat before it happened, which rather punctured the moment, and the dubbing is dreadful, even in the Italian. But those are the wrinkles of a film past sixty, and they barely dim what Bava was up to here, which was close to revolutionary. Three and a half stars, a ravishing and hugely influential slice of early giallo that any fan of the genre, or of horror's roots, ought to seek out.
Blood and Black Lace belongs to a moment in European cinema when genre filmmakers were doing genuinely experimental work under the cover of pulp entertainment, and it has earned its place in horror history on the strength of that work rather than through nostalgia or revisionism. It arrives slightly rough at the edges now, as all sixty-year-old films do, but the roughness is part of its texture rather than a reason to discount it. For anyone building a picture of how modern horror got to where it is, this is one of the key exhibits, a film that was doing something new while appearing to do something disreputable. There is an argument to be made that the most interesting cinema has often worked exactly that way.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1964 | Watched: 2026-09-27
Trailer
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