HOST 2 (1) pp.

159–170 Intellect Limited 2011

Horror Studies
Volume 2 Number 1
© 2011 Intellect Ltd Reviews. English language. doi: 10.1386/host.2.1.159_5

REVIEWS

DARK LONDON: URBAN GOTHIC OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR,

SARA WASSON (2010)
Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 224 pp.,
ISBN: 9780 2305 7753 4, Hardback, £50

Reviewed by Steffen Hantke, Sogang University (Seoul)

Foreigners visiting UK book stores often find themselves baffled by the shelf
space allotted to World War II, and the variety of books placed on those
shelves. More than 50 years after the end of that war, its centrality within
British culture – as a mythic origin of national character through shared histor-
ical experience – seems undiminished. The degree to which living through
World War II, especially in the nation’s capital, really was a shared experience,
however, depends on the historical master narrative one is ready to accept.
This narrative, as Sara Wasson reminds us in her monograph Dark London:
Urban Gothic of the Second World War, was largely a matter of governmental
propaganda, which – though it continued to have its uses in the post-war
period – was initiated originally during the war, to ensure civilian support of
military engagement abroad and endurance of increasingly insufferable living
conditions at home. It spoke of a nation coming together in a shared defiance
of the enemy, a nation enduring aerial bombardment with dignity and equa-
nimity and deprivation with a sense of humour, a spontaneous manifestation
of what Benedict Anderson calls ‘imagined community’ or ‘deep horizontal
comradeship’ (quoted in Wasson 2010: 16).
Though the process in which this cultural master narrative has disintegrated
over the years may have started in the somewhat hermetic realm of academic
historiography, it has long since reached popular culture. A television series
like Anthony Horowitz’s Foyle’s War (2002), for example, specialized in expos-
ing the most threadbare spots in the fabric of wartime propaganda, taking the
nation to task for its anti-Semitism, class inequalities, xenophobia, capitalist

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profiteering and the general erosion of civil liberties under an authoritarian

governmental rule which, in its worst excesses, bore uncanny resemblance to
the dreaded enemy across the Channel.
However, as revisionist as Foyle’s War might be, its deconstruction of the
World War II home front narrative turns on its simultaneous replacement
of that narrative with a functionally similar ideological construct. For every
ideological cover-up exposed by Foyle and his team, the programme indulges
in the British equivalent of ‘greatest generation’ nostalgia. Given its generic
limitations as a police procedural, its wise, calm and cautious hero metes out
justice and brings about closure.
There is no such comfort in the novels, short stories, poems, memoirs and
paintings Sara Wasson examines in Dark London. Authors range from Henry
Green, Grahame Greene, Elisabeth Bowen and Mervyn Peake, who are well
known for work beyond the theme of wartime Britain, to lesser known authors
like Anna Kavan, Roy Fuller and Inez Holden, who are more closely tied to the
period. Wasson shows how the sensual experiences and the emotional land-
scape into which they translate wartime London align themselves with the
Foucauldian carceral continuum. A system of air raid shelters, weapons facto-
ries, mental asylums and hospitals – which extends its grasp on the domestic
sphere of urban and suburban houses and, ultimately, even to human bodies,
both dead and alive – rewrites ordinary bourgeois experiences in a register of
pure horror. Instead of propaganda’s stiff upper lip and good cheer, anxiety,
hysteria and paranoia reign supreme. Projected onto this interlinking system
of discrete spaces is a grid of governmental surveillance and discipline that,
paradoxically, exacerbates military devastation and civic unease instead of
containing them. In the centre of this nightmarish landscape is the metropo-
lis, London itself, evoked by Wasson and the authors she discusses in all her
crumbling colonial, industrial and cultural splendour.
Through their allegiance to the tradition of the Gothic, all texts Wasson
deals with harbour the potential for a secondary revisionist twist that has gone
unrecognized, or at least underappreciated, within the public discourse on
World War II. The Gothic, Wasson quotes David Punter, ‘is a mode – perhaps
the mode – of unofficial history’ (p. 23). As such, it harbours the potential not
only to resist the propagandist narrative of the nation as an imagined commu-
nity held together by spontaneous ‘deep horizontal comradeship’, but also its
subsequent critique, which tries to put the ghosts of the past to rest by drag-
ging them into broad daylight and thus imposing therapeutic closure onto
national trauma. Perhaps, Wasson writes, ‘some collective wounds should not
be healed so easily’ (p. 162).
The Gothic, Wasson suggests, is particularly well suited (more so perhaps
than a police procedural like Foyle’s War) to this task of keeping the collective
wounds open because of its penchant for the fragmentary, the open-ended,
the unresolved; ‘Gothic tropes and forms mark moments of fracture in the
national mythologies of wartime home, city and fellowship’ (p. 1). As in the
tracing of the Gothic’s complex history, Wasson is careful not to oversimplify
its politics. Despite the book’s emphasis on the corrosive effects of the Gothic
on the dominant narrative, she acknowledges that it is not inherently subver-
sive but only so when deliberately deployed in this manner. Similarly, Wasson
takes her cue from Glennis Byron’s and David Punter’s collection Spectral
Readings: Toward a Gothic Geography (Palgrave/Macmillan, 1999), particu-
larly from Alexandra Warwick’s essay ‘Lost Cities: London’s Apocalypse’. Yet
Dark London is in no way derivative; inspired by the collection’s ‘spatial twist’,

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it finds a more specific historical context for Warwick’s discussion of urban

apocalypse as a Gothic trope, and explores this new angle with a keen eye for
its relevance to contemporary issues.
As a result, Dark London is an enjoyable read, especially for the efficiency
with which it works within the rules of academic writing. Wasson is always
clear yet never overly detailed when she defines key terminology or situates
critical opinion historically. Similarly, she introduces authors in reference to
their biographies only to the extent that their lives matter to the close read-
ing of their texts; and she situates her close readings within the larger theo-
retical and thematic framework – from Freudian psychoanalysis to the current
discussion on trauma – in a manner that maintains focus upon these primary
texts. The same competent efficiency also applies to Wasson’s laying out of
the historical context; life in wartime London is sketched out in lively and
often striking detail, with a sense of historical specificity and recognition of
discontinuities that resist ready-made historical clichés.
Given its focus and its length of 160-odd pages, the book leaves few loose
ends, all of which feel less like oversights and more like invitations to further
enquiry. One such idea emerging from Wasson’s literary and artistic nexus
of the Gothic, the urban and the war stems from a source Wasson quotes,
which states that the ‘great fire raid of 29 December 1940 almost annihilated
the central city in a blaze which has been described as the closest Britain ever
came to the firestorms of Dresden and Hamburg’ (p. 6). It is this comparison
between London on the one hand, and Dresden and Hamburg on the other
that suggests an ongoing recognition, disavowed in public discourse, of the
analogous devastation and suffering between enemies in World War II. Future
criticism of the Gothic might ask to what degree there was – or better still, is –
an awareness that the Royal Air Force was subjecting German civilians to the
same treatment the German Luftwaffe and Vergeltungswaffen were meting out to
Londoners, and what exactly the emotional impact would have been, or would
be even today, were this recognition ever to be openly acknowledged. The same
possibility of an uncanny doubling is raised by Wasson’s descriptions of British
wartime disciplining of civilian populations (from the mass-euthanazation
of pets, to restrictions on noise, light and movement) (pp. 12–13). It appears
that, political ideologies aside, the same military ethos prevails, producing
similar civilian conditions, in both Germany and Britain – an uncomfortable,
even scandalous assertion even by today’s standards. Wasson herself explicitly
acknowledges that Britain did, of course, not have a monopoly on suffering
(p. 24), but the degree of outrage dominating, for example, the debate in
Britain about whether General Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris might be considered a
war criminal suggests that a dominant narrative is still in place that even the
more subversive texts of the urban Gothic might fail to dismantle.
Wasson’s interest in individual and collective trauma forms the core of the
book’s closing remarks in an afterword entitled ‘The Politics of Lamentation’.
Outlining basic positions in the current debate on trauma and mourn-
ing, Wasson deliberates about the political implications of coming to terms
with grief. Though her tone remains, as always, analytical, it is clear that she
favours forms of mourning that, analogous to the fiction she reads, ultimately
defy closure. Though one might disagree with Wasson on her preference, its
immediate effect is to point beyond the narrow confines of the wartime period,
to the lasting effects of the war on British culture, and hence to that pesky
question why British book stores still stack up so heavily on World War II.

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 Reviews

MARIO BAVA: ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK, TIM LUCAS (2007)
Cincinnati: Video Watchdog, 1128 pp.,
ISBN: 9780 9633 7561 2, Hardback, $250

Reviewed by Tony Williams, Southern Illinois University (Carbondale, IL)

Under any circumstances the appearance of this book would be a major

achievement on the part of its author. Who else would spend over 30 years
exploring this subject and presenting an extensively documented and excel-
lently illustrated huge book that makes a very convincing case as to ‘Why we
should take Mario Bava (1914–1980) seriously’ (I use Robin Wood’s phrase
relating to Hitchcock deliberately here), other than the editor of that valu-
able publication Video Watchdog that has now celebrated its twentieth anni-
versary. In my opinion, this is one of the most impressive books ever to have
been written about any director, a dedicated labour of love now available in a
privately published edition for those willing to pay the expensive price (justifi-
able under the circumstances) or requesting it for a public or university library.
This is something that could never have been achieved in academia, with its
‘publish or perish’ mandate for those fortunate enough to gain a tenure-track
position in any university and expected to produce a minimum of two books
now in a herculean effort to gain tenure within seven years. Tim Lucas has
performed one of the labours of Hercules, a well-known figure in the peplum
world of Italian cinema that Bava significantly contributed in his era. He has
also worked on this project during the average career period of 30 years most
academics spend in the hallowed portals of academia (now one closely resem-
bling the Gothic paranoid world of many Bava films) given the usual casu-
alty and attrition rate affecting those fortunate enough to last that long. Mario
Bava is not a work that could be written in academia, a statement that is not
meant to discredit the project but instead to reflect great credit on its author.
If ‘all roads lead to Rome’ then this is one of those great exceptions that prove
that those working outside an institutional framework can achieve compara-
ble and even better results than those working within academia. Tim Lucas
has proved the validity of this second comparison in more senses than one.
Beginning with an introduction by Riccardo Freda, this 1128-page magnum
opus is a ‘weighty tome’ presenting a challenge not only to those of us attempt-
ing to carry it to a car parked some distance away from the library and lacking
the physique of Steve Reeves or Reg Park, but anyone attempting to review
such a work of detailed and fascinating information in the usual number of
pages allotted to most book reviews. Lucas conveys exciting information not
only about Bava himself, but also about those he worked with and the industry
he functioned within that contains material for many other books. This book
needs to be respectfully read in a spirit of dedication equal to that of its author,
and the reader will not emerge disappointed. The odyssey will result in new
learning and discovery, as well as revision of any previous opinions concerning
the director and a stimulus to see as much of his work as possible.
In an era of meticulously calculated word counts affecting not only books
but also essays in anthologies and encyclopedias, it is extremely doubtful
that a work of this magnitude would ever be printed today by any academic
or mainstream publisher and this fact is also true of 1975 when the author
began his work. This hardback edition began when the author put out a call to

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readers to subscribe to his work before it was completed, and those answering
his call not only eventually received the book at a reduced rate (not cheap yet
still handsomely comparable to its selling price today and containing more
pages than certain academic publishers printing smaller books for three-
figure sums), but also had their names listed in an appendix roll of honour
they justifiably deserve. A paperback edition would be impossible since this
huge work would tear at the seams, and the current hardback version was
printed in China (I hesitate to think what a western printer would charge).
As it is, I can testify that not a page is wasted. Each one contains scrupulously
documented and fascinating information not likely to be found elsewhere.
Since I arrived late on the scene (as usual) I was unable to take advan-
tage of the generous pre-publication subscription offer, but pleaded with my
university Humanities librarian to obtain a copy of a book I regarded as being
of supreme importance, one that should be purchased by any library worthy
of the name. In a time of increasing budget cuts to higher education in this
state involving the elimination of over 1000 journal subscriptions, this gener-
ous lady agreed to my request. Should a second edition of Mario Bava ever
appear, then the author might consider a second appendix devoted to those
open-minded librarians who affirmatively responded to such requests. Once
the spring semester concluded, I had the time to devote full attention to this
book and, to use the old phrase, ‘could not put it down’, more due to its
excellent scholarly nature and less to my inability to achieve the prowess of
Steve Reeves in those old peplum films. The author evoked past memories.
Little did I suspect that when I viewed Hercules (1958), Hercules Unchained
(1959), The Last Days of Pompeii (1959), The White Warrior (1960), Sign of the
Gladiator (1961) and Morgan the Pirate (1960) many magic moments in these
Reeves films, which were flacid for the most part, owed much to the uncred-
ited involvement of Mario Bava, whether operating as co-director, cinematog-
rapher, special effects coordinator or glass matte painter, which he excelled
at. Reading the author’s detailed coverage, I thought at many times, ‘So that’s
why I liked that scene!’ This explains why I have never forgotten the image of
the tragic Sylvia Lopez from Hercules Unchained from the first time I saw her.
Through no fault of her own, Sylva Koscina remains blurred in my memory
but not her rival in this Hercules sequel, whom Bava embraced with his distinc-
tive lighting, immortalizing her and making her cinematically comparable to
the image of H. Rider Haggard’s She. What a great She Lopez would have
made had she lived, challenging Ursula Andress as she did Sylva Koscina.
All these activities occurred before Bava became a director, and his special
visual signatures continued long afterwards. By all accounts he was a retiring
person, polite, but more at home with various aspects of technology than with
actors, a cinematic magician casting fantastic visual spells following a different,
but parallel, route to Orson Welles, who had his own way of making things
happen that did not occur in reality. As Scorsese mentions in his introduction,
the plots of Bava films are difficult to remember. The same is true of many of
the above-mentioned titles that Bava never directed. This is because he was
a master of visual atmosphere, an element rooted in the very intuitive nature
of cinema that few directors actually realize, let alone achieve. Scorsese aptly
compares the director’s best films to dream situations that are never signalled
but emerge subtly to overwhelm viewer consciousness in their most realized
manifestations.
He places his viewers and his character in an oddly disquieting state where
they’re compelled to keep moving forward – even though they don’t know

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precisely why, or where they’re going. The atmosphere itself becomes the
principal character, a living organism with a mind and will of its own. Bava
was a master craftsman, and he knew how to create a mood, where every
sound, every movement of the camera, and every object was weighted with
mystery and unease (p. 13).
Naturally, working within the low-budget area of Italian cinema and
making films often cut, hideously dubbed and re-titled for foreign consump-
tion, very little appreciation of Bava’s work could occur when seen abroad.
However examples such as La Maschera del Demonia/Black Sunday (1960)
revealed its indisputable visual style. But viewers such as Tim Lucas and future
directors like Joe Dante could ignore such irritating alterations to the originals
and discern these works in their true dimensions long before better versions
were available.
As well as being a meticulously documented text, this book is illustrated
with stills (personal and publicity included), lobby cards and posters from differ-
ent countries, revealing that the author must have spent a fortune on eBay and
other sources. For those of us who find it hard to believe that American actor
Dan Vadis was ever muscular judging from his later roles in Fort Yuma Gold
(1966), High Plains Drifter (1972), Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and Every
Which Way You Can (1980), the evidence is now indisputable from a lobby
card and stills (pp. 570–71) from Hercules the Invincible (1964), a film that Bava
was probably involved in anonymously in terms of special effects. The author
makes every attempt to verify his assumptions, and where evidence is limited a
list of other possibilities is provided on pp. 1066–67. Where no direct evidence
with surviving contributions to Bava’s films is available, the author has been
able to gain secondary access via overseas contacts, as well as published mate-
rial in old film magazines and elsewhere. This book is both verbal and visual,
the latter aspect appropriately illustrating the author’s case for taking this
neglected figure seriously both as an artist in his own right and as a key influ-
ence on Italian and World Cinema. The endpaper illustration of the demonic
landscape from Hercules in the Haunted World (aka Hercules in the Center of the
Earth, 1961) reveals an image lit up with recognizable Bava colours, which will
become recognizable after reading the entire book and by those of us fortunate
to see the entire film on YouTube and through other sources.
Concentrating on its main subject and making interesting observations on
Bava’s distinctive type of authorship, the book is also a stimulating compen-
dium of key influences on the director, prompting a series of different stud-
ies by readers interested in following these fascinating leads. In addition to
documenting Italian pre-war, wartime, and post-war cinema, the book indi-
rectly depicts that lost world of 1960s cosmopolitan Italy that Brett Halsey has
described as

part of a time and place which would turn out to be as memorable as

Paris in the 1920s, Hollywood in the 1930s, Paris again in the late 1940s,
and Greenwich Village and North Beach in the 1950s. The intangible
ingredients that made this epoch possible did not exist before the 1960s
and certainly no longer exist today.
(Murray: 146, 208)

The fact that this book covers an Italian director’s work in genres such as
sword and sandal, giallo, horror, thrillers, science fiction and Westerns does
not make this quotation irrelevant, since Bava was part of this era, one in

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which Hollywood directors such as Andre DeToth, Jacques Tourneur and

Raoul Walsh took the road to Rome in the twilight years of their careers,
while actors such as Halsey, Steve Reeves and Clint Eastwood found star-
dom in the commercial Italian cinema of that time. Although readers may be
familiar with the narrative of Vincente Minelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town
(1962) and its source novel by Irwin Shaw, a much better and more compre-
hensive picture is revealed in Brett Halsey’s unjustifiably neglected novel The
Magnificent Strangers (1978).
‘Magnificent’ is another epithet that this book aptly deserves. Documenting
Bava’s family life, including hitherto unknown information about an unsung
Italian cinematic figure, Bava’s own father Eugenio Bava (1886–1966), the book
also contains key interviews with members of this important family, most nota-
bly Mario’s son Lamberto and grandson Roy, who continue the family tradi-
tions. By all accounts Bava was an extremely talented but modest person, who
retreated from the limelight, always ready to repair films by other directors
whether American or Italian, similar to the function of Andrew Marton. Bava
would work behind the scenes contributing imaginative magical moments via
special effects, glass matte constructions and often-uncredited camerawork.
In many ways, he was a Renaissance man of contemporary Italian cinema in
his undisputed mastery of technique and the creation of breathtaking illu-
sions in the many films he worked on. Although Bava was often disparaged at
home and abroad as a minor horror director and saw himself overshadowed
towards the end of his life by the accelerated careers of younger talents such
as Dario Argento and Sergio Martino, the author makes a compelling case for
appreciating the unique nature of Bava’s talent. His former production secre-
tary Rosalba Scavia regarded him as a ‘genuine artist’, and always felt ‘that
he would have been a greater success as a painter’ (p. 616), something that
the collaborative and often tension-ridden world of film production conspired
against his desire to be a real creative artist.
Following the author’s prologue outlining the significance of this study
in terms of past and present historical considerations, the next two chapters
document the significance of Bava’s father, described as ‘The Invisible Man
of Italian Cinema’, and the son’s productive career as a cameraman between
1939 and 1960, an essential period for his evolution.
There can be no real understanding of Bava’s development as a filmmaker
without a knowledge of the years he spent as a director of photography; it is
during this period that we witness his evolution as an artist and the emer-
gence of a highly individual cinematographic style – a signature touch devel-
oped in the shadow of war and in response to the demands of a wide variety
of film genres (p. 65).
This was truly a learning experience involving national and Hollywood
influences, amply documented with family photos stills, and behind-the-
scenes images, an argument supported by a very comprehensive text dealing
with relevant cultural, historical and technological information. However, as the
succeeding chapter states, Bava was much More Than a Cameraman, and detailed
surveys of films such as I Vampiri (1957), Hercules, The Day the Earth Exploded
(1958), Sign of the Gladiator, Hercules Unchained, The Last Days of Pompeii and
The Battle of Marathon (1959) reveal the presence of a ‘Bava touch’ parallel to
that well-known ‘Lubitsch touch’ despite the fact that Bava did not occupy the
role of director on these films. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of this very
well-researched chapter reveals again how cinematic authorship is much more
complex and flexible than its literary counterpart. Bava’s collaboration with

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Riccardo Freda during this period receives detailed examination, and the future
director’s contribution to one scene in Caltiki the Immortal Monster (1959) involv-
ing fake footage is certainly recognized. Lucas describes this as follows:

This is a milestone sequence in the history of horror cinematography;

with it, Bava founded a new, previously uncharted dimension in cine-
matic fright. Possibly rooted in literary antecedents like Daniel Defoe’s
‘found manuscript’ novel A Journal of the Plague Year or Lovecraft’s own
apocryphal devilbook The Necronomicon – but most currently informed
by Bava’s past experience in forging wartime newsreels at the Istituto
LUCE – the deliberate ‘home movie’ sloppiness of this sequence
removes the perceived barrier of safety which had always existed up to
this moment between a horror film and its audience.
(p. 263)

This is not the only instance in this study where the author recognizes Bava’s
claim to be regarded as the pioneer of many well-known effects in genre
cinema today. At the same time, as noted above, the very relevant nature of
stimulating cultural and historical insights contributes to the excellence of this
work. Naturally, the magisterial nature of Bava’s first film as director – Black
Sunday – receives detailed coverage, but so too do his other neglected contri-
butions to films such as The Thief of Baghdad (1961), Goliath and the Vampires
(1961), Hercules in the Haunted World and Erik the Conqueror (1961). The
author notes that one key influence on Hercules Unchained was not the world
of Greek and Roman myths, but rather a storyline from Alex Raymond’s 1935
comic strip Flash Gordon that involves the hero’s capture by Azura, the Witch
Queen, with her use of a magic potion that drugs him ‘into a state of adoring
submission’ (p. 230). Significantly, the author notes that Bava may also be the
uncredited originator of the family horror film that flourished particularly in
America during the 1970s, as his references to Black Sunday and Black Sabbath
(1963) reveal. Concerning the first, the author notes that,

As we delve deeper into Bava’s work as a director, we will see that

another of his principal themes was the destructive properties of the
family unit, and it is fascinating to find it already in flower in his first
film – in fact, in its very first scenes.
(p. 230)

This is not the first instance in the book where the reader realizes that several
established histories of cinema must be revised and rewritten. Referring to
Erik the Conqueror, a further insight emerges: ‘Marriage, then, in the view of
Bava’s film, is a contract with death’ (p. 431).
Many names, both known and relatively unknown, appear throughout
this book documenting not only the author’s expert knowledge, but also the
necessity for further research. Although the American actress Harriet White
Medin (1914–2005) may only be known to western viewers from her appear-
ance in a segment of Roberto Rossellin’s Paisa (1946), she was not only the
first American actress to work in post-war Italian cinema, but also had a distin-
guished career behind as well as before the camera working as a dialogue
coach on Esther and the King (1960) and often collaborating with Bava himself.
I’ve often wondered who the director of Legend of the Sea Wolf (1976) starring
Chuck Connors actually was, and the author supplies the answer by informing

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his readers that Giuseppe Vari began work as a film editor in the late 1940s
before directing his first film in 1951. This is not the only instance where I
found that this book supplied information I’ve searched for in vain elsewhere.
Material concerning the overseas exile of Cameron Mitchell (1918–1994), his
work in the Italian film industry of the 1960s, and his problematic return home
to the United States also appears in this book.
What is giallo and how can we distinguish it from the ‘thriller’? In his
study of Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1962), the author supplies an
answer to this very complicated question, noting the term’s historical anteced-
ents as well as its associations with not only Bava’s work but also that of his
peers and successors. Bava was a collector of these novels, but although this
film is neither the first Italian thriller nor giallo, it is ‘an important step in the
evolution of Italian movie thrillers’ (p. 439) not just for its Hitchcock associa-
tions, but as ‘the earliest theatrical release to acknowledge the gialli, not only
as an influence on its storytelling and mise-en-scene, but as part of the story it
tells’ (p. 450). Although shot in black and white, as opposed to the later colour
and graphic violence of its more recognizable successors, The Girl Who Knew
Too Much (1963) is a remarkable experiment in dream-like narration pointing
the way forward to other developments by Bava and others.
The colour imagery of Black Sabbath (1963) has received notice in the past,
but here the author draws a remarkable parallel with Kobayashi’s Kwaidan
(1964), shot around the same time and emerging from a very different culture.

Both films conjure atmospheres of exquisite terror by exaggerating the

beauty of their settings; Kobayashi’s film does this by accentuating the
theatrical unreality of his scenes and settings; some of which are staged
before elaborate, impressionistically painted backdrops, whereas Bava’s
film achieves an atmosphere of otherness entirely through its inventive
use of color and light.
(p. 511)

Documenting the original source material, the different versions of Black

Sabbath, and various editorial changes according to the meticulous manner
displayed throughout this book, the author notes Karloff’s wurdulak episode
as depicting not only ‘the decimation of an entire family structure by vampir-
ism’, but also ‘shocking, powerfully dramatized acts of incestuous predation
and pedophilia’ (p. 502) merely hinted at in Black Sunday. In each episode of
this anthology, style appropriately manifests content in a film that ‘innovated
a new approach to photographing horror films in color, a method of lighting
that seemed to acknowledge in all scenes and situations the presence of the
Unknown as well as the Known’ (p. 511).
When examining Blood and Black Lace (1964), significant associations
between the literary aspects of giallo and the Italian psyche documented by Luigi
Barzini in The Italians (1965) necessitate revisions of previous critical dispar-
agements of Bava as being merely a ‘bad-taste director’. The author chooses a
highly appropriate cultural quotation from Barzini to illustrate his point:

Italians fear sudden and violent death. The vigorous passions of a turbu-
lent and restless people are always ready to flare up unexpectedly like
hot coals under the ashes. Italy is a blood-stained country. Almost every
day of the year jealous husbands kill their adulterous wives and their
lovers; about as many wives kill their adulterous husbands and their

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mistresses […] Even when violent death is not lurking in the shadows
[…] an Italian must remain on the alert and move with circumspection.
(p. 542)

The author points out that the film is misunderstood by most reviewers since
far from

objectifying its women victims and eroticizing the violence against them,
it is the fashion world that objectifies women. As an industry, it has prob-
ably done more to reduce women to a surface image than any other; at
its worst, it abstracts them to the point of making them inhuman, if not
actually dead. Real flesh-and-blood women have literally killed them-
selves trying to live up to the images projected in the world of haute
couture. If anything, Sei donne shows us how offensive are the aesthetics
that we apply to women in life, when applied to them in death.
(p. 566)

This is a really interesting statement revealing Bava not only ahead of his time
but still waiting for time to catch up with him.
Perhaps one of the most interesting collaborations with Bava involved the
actress Laura Betti (1927–2004). A colleague of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975),
she phoned Bava following her Best Actress Award for Teorema (1968) request-
ing a role in the film of a director she regarded as representing the opposite of
an intellectual talent. She worked with him on two films documenting the dark
side of the marital experience, the first being Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1969),
which has some macabre autobiographical components dealing with a char-
acter haunted by the presence of a wife he has murdered in death as he was
in life. With full knowledge of relevant personal details, this film ‘acquires a
confessional aura rarely encountered in horror cinema. While hardly a master-
piece, it has all the personal relevance and revelation one seeks in a master-
piece’ (p. 791). The film anticipates American Psycho (2000) in several ways,
since both films deal with a character revealed in voice-over to be a psycho-
path, with Hatchet ‘introducing an entirely new and profound phraseology of
emotional dislocation into the language of cinema’ (p. 793). The analysis of
5 Dolls for an August Moon (1970), a film ‘seething with apparent indignation
or self-loathing, which is apparent from the way its potential for suspense […]
is repeatedly sabotaged by the director’ (p. 823), contains some disturbing
parallels with the way certain Hitchcock critics regarded Marnie (1964).
The second film Betti worked on with Bava – Twitch of the Dead Nerve
(1971) – may contain some clues as to the director’s actual philosophy in
terms of the depiction of its various characters.
The point is not to deny these characters their humanity, but rather to
portray how transient and meaningless are the schemes in which they involve
themselves, compared to what is truly eternal: the bay, the planet, the heritage
that we pass on to our children. For viewers aware of Bava’s continued attention
over the years to elemental imagery – earth, air, fire, and water – this prominent
statement of an ecological theme marks an apotheosis in his work (pp. 864–65).
The author again employs Barzini to understand what is significant about
this film distributed abroad under a lurid title whose original one Ecologia Del
Delitto is more relevant to what actually occurs in the narrative.
Ecology is sometimes casually mistaken as a synonym for natural pres-
ervation, but it actually designates a branch of biology concerned with the

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relationship between living organisms and their environment. Frank Ventura

can only come to terms with the world outside his villa by recognizing oppor-
tunities to make money from it. Paolo Fossati by preying upon his insects and
categorizing them on pinned cards; and Simon sees his inheritance as his only
chance to gain the legitimacy he never had. These people have no relationship
to their environment, only to their own selfish needs; thus the environment is
no poorer for their loss. (pp. 866–67)
Naturally, families and marriages are also characterized by similar imbal-
ances, and thus it is natural that events take a violent turn in a film that is
boldly and thematically rich but also flawed structurally. Here Bava parallels
Hitchcock, who, in Frenzy (1972), attempted to break away from a previously
structured narrative form and reach a new generation of viewers.
Bava was a director whom Elke Sommer recalls from her work in Lisa and
the Devil (hideously altered for western release as House of Exorcism) as some-
one having a more subtle and unverbalized approach to direction that she
regarded as being more intuitive than merely picking the right people, or faces,
or leaving them alone. The environment, the atmosphere provided by Bava,
was intended to serve as an almost supernatural inducement of the perform-
ance he required […] Rather than impose a wholly preconceived performance
in an actor who might ring false […] and therefore look wrong onscreen, this
conductor of morbid atmospheres ‘preferred to extract performances through
the more elemental catalysts of environment and instinct’ (p. 912).
Significantly, this suggests a very different director than the usual prestig-
ious suspects who employed the concept of ‘pure cinema’ in his own particu-
lar manner paralleling similar experiments of Alfred Hitchcock and Michael
Powell. The author also suggests that the fantasy represented by the events
in Lisa and the Devil may have anticipated the idea of the ‘Stendahl syndrome
that Bava’s successor Dario Argento also used later’.
Bava directed other films after this, and worked on the special effects for
Moses the Lawgiver (1975), and he also directed Argento’s diva Daria Nicolodi
in Schock (1977) and the television film The Venus of Ille (1978). One film that
he directed but which was not released during his lifetime was Rabid Dogs
(1974), another examination of the savagery of human existence but made
outside the horror genre. He finally worked uncredited on the special effects
of Dario Argento’s Inferno (1980), and died in the early morning hours of
25 April 1980 at the age of 65 after working on various other projects. Had he
relocated to America or been more prominent in the high-profile network-
ing system of the Italian film industry, Bava could have accomplished more
and become a much better recognized figure than he actually was. However,
despite the various difficulties affecting him mostly related to his personal life
and work, he left a legacy. Similarly, Tim Lucas has also left his own legacy
in this monumental work of detailed film criticism that will be a hard act to
follow in the same way as Bava’s achievements are for his various successors.
This book should inspire us to know more about cinema, reject unneces-
sary prejudices, and venture further into discovering a territory of pure cinema
and championing this path whether artistic or commercial. It is crucial that
readers do this if only for the future of a tradition that inspired Mario Bava
and his chronicler Tim Lucas. The author has shown that the world of Italian
horror needs to be taken much more seriously than it has been so far. Italian
cinema is far from being a misleading stereotypical world of bambinos and
vino since it has its own divergent paths that should not be entirely limited to
the explorations of those great celebrated artists such as Antonioni, DeSica,

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Fellini and Visconti who form a particular version of an Italian cinematic

‘Great Tradition’. Bava’s films represent a disturbing, traumatic, dark side of
Italian society haunted by the Mussolini era, with those images of dark castles
that appear in many of his films. Perhaps they represent his own version of
a ‘return of the repressed’, since horror films were banned in Italy during
the Fascist era. The family with its dark sadomasochistic practices seen in
The Whip and the Body (1963) and the torture chambers in the land of Baron
Blood (1972) Italy’s ally in World War Two contain dark visual overtones of a
disturbed history where images speak louder than words. In the latter film,
Joseph Cotten’s Austrian version of Vlad the Impaler has missed his ideal
historical period by two centuries to say nothing of his Nazi descendants who
could have well used his expertise in torture. Yet, though Baron Blood suffers
the fate of Dr Moreau, there is every chance that another unwitting descend-
ent will revive him so that he will leave his castle and re-experience his former
pleasures in Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. Statues constantly inhabit the world of
Mario Bava, their dead marble forms are suggestive of pre-modern fossili-
zation that embodies the destiny of the living who do not heed the direc-
tor’s ecological philosophy. Succumbing to selfishness and material greed
or not fighting back enough reduces the living human to a mannequin, the
fate awaiting Lisa in the final sequence in the plane in the climax of Lisa and
the Devil where she finds that the Devil not only has the last laugh, but is at
home with modern technology.
It may appear churlish to note problems in a text that was obviously a
nightmare to proofread and sub-edit throughout the long process of its gesta-
tion. But should a second edition appear, then these infinitesimal flaws should
disappear, making the book as perfect as possible – and it is 99 per cent close
to this goal now. For example, Fred Astaire starred in The Band Wagon (1953)
not Gene Kelly as mentioned on p. 203. A very rare typo – ‘jsssssustice’ for
‘justice’ –appears on page 432. On p. 481, the Ealing anthology Dead of Night
is dated 1946, as opposed to its correct date of 1945 that appears on p. 511.
Although Mark Damon believed that the talent agent who contacted him was
Groucho Marx, there was an earlier Marx brother named Gummo who had
left the team before they entered the world of film (p. 499). Michel Piccoli did
not play ‘the dull husband of Catherine Denueve in Belle du Jour’ (p. 731) but
rather his lusty friend. Jean Sorel was the husband. Lucas describes Spartacus
(1960) as ‘a pro-Zionist statement’ on p. 122 but I see little evidence of this
either in the film or later interviews with those concerned. However, the
amazing aspect of this book is that very few errors appear in something that
must have demanded a Herculean level of sub-editing.
This is an outstanding book, the first of its type ever to have appeared in
film criticism and one that should be read by everyone expressing any serious
interest in this area. It represents a challenge to any writer to be as comprehen-
sive as possible and to provide strong evidence for the arguments presented
rather than evasive assertions. If the retail price is too high for one’s pocket
then one can either order it from a local library or acquire it via an inter-library
loan. Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark is too important a book to bypass or
neglect. It represents essential reading in every sense of the word.

REFERENCE
Murray, John, Brett Halsey: Art or Instinct in the Movies, Baltimore, MD:
Midnight Marquee Press, pp. 146, 208.

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