After nearly 40 years in the business and with 22 officially credited features as a director, Mario Bava made his final feature film with 1977’s Shock, also known to U.S. audiences as Beyond the Door II. Just three years after its release, Bava died of a heart attack. He was 65 years old.
Of all his horror films, Shock feels the least like what we have come to expect of a “Mario Bava movie.” While most of his work has an aesthetic and feel that’s very specific to his sensibilities, Shock seems like it could have been made by any number of the Italian horror directors working at that time. This is probably because, as the story goes, the movie actually was made by another Italian horror director working at the time: Bava’s son Lamberto, who co-wrote the screenplay and is a talented filmmaker in his own right, with titles like A Blade in the Dark, Delirium, and, most famously, Demons and its sequel to his credit. The story goes that the junior Bava directed a number of scenes in Shock when his father fell to poor health, resulting in a movie that has a slightly younger sensibility but also loses some of Mario Bava’s baroque touches in the process.
The great Daria Nicolodi gives her very best performance as Dora, a fragile woman recently released from a behavioral hospital after her husband mysteriously committed suicide. Now remarried and with her young son Marco in tow, Dora moves into her old house and begins to experience terrifying visions, believing that her son is possessed by the spirit of her late husband and slowly coming to terms with the truth behind his death.
The guilt of previous transgressions – the sins of the past – had already played a major role in the work of Mario Bava by the time he made Shock, yet another movie in which the filmmaker addresses how his characters are haunted by their actions both figuratively and literally: Black Sabbath, The Whip and the Body, and Hatchet for the Honeymoon all explicitly deal with this theme. Shock once again plays the game of “is this real/is this imagined” when it comes to the manifestations of that guilt, but the results are the same: the main character gradually loses her mind and may even turn murderous when confronted with the realities of her past. The ideas aren’t explored in a way that’s vastly unlike Bava’s other movies, meaning the film isn’t so much a victory lap as it is once more around the track – although this time, Bava is sharing the driver’s seat.
If the themes feel familiar, the difference with Shock is that it’s a movie more concerned with visceral scares and, let’s just say it, shocks than it is with atmosphere and dread. The good news is that Bava proves to be just as successful in this regard, having working in special effects as far back as Caltiki, The Immortal Monster in 1959 – a film for which he is credited with ghost directing a great deal, giving the participation of son Lamberto on Shock a kind of full-circle symmetry in Bava’s career. The scares in Shock are one of its greatest strengths, whether it’s a creepy hand that appears periodically or a gorgeously disturbing moment in which the petal of a rose turns to blood. There is an incredible jump scare – arguably the movie’s most famous shot – that is based on how quickly something changes within the frame reminiscent of the great skeleton scare in Dario Argento’s Inferno, a film for which Bava supposedly contributed a number of special effects shortly before his death (though it should be mentioned that Lamberto Bava has claimed that the shot was his idea). On this kind of a technical level, Shock proves that Bava hasn’t lost his fastball.
The movie itself is somewhat confused, however, blending elements of Bava’s gift for technique with a more contemporary aesthetic that creates, at times, a Mario Bava film that doesn’t feel like a Mario Bava film. It has its strengths – the effective jolts among them, but none more than Daria Nicolodi’s raw, increasingly hysterical performance – but it’s a rare Bava film that is best admired in pieces rather than as a whole. If the stories of its origins and production are to be believed, it’s a film that Bava’s heart wasn’t in all the way. That translates to the screen, even if a half-hearted Bava movie is still capable of greatness.
As Shock ends, so too does the career of one of the greatest directors ever to grace the horror genre – a filmmaker whose influence would carry through all of the Italian artists who followed him and is still felt today in everything from the eye-popping color of Jackson Stewart’s indie Beyond the Gates to the lush gothic romanticism of Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak. His legacy is incomparable, his body of work untouchable. If Shock doesn’t find the director ending at his peak, it at least suggests that, with the help of his son, Bava was attempting to transition into a more modern style of storytelling and to keep up with the genre he played a major role in creating. Such a willingness to evolve is the mark of a great director who had already long since proven his greatness.
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Shock is screening as part of the 21-film Mario Bava series taking place at New York City’s Quad Cinema July 14th–25th, and check here to read more of Patrick's Mario Bava retrospectives.
Patrick lives in Chicago, where he has been writing about film since 2004. A member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Online Film Critics Society, Patrick's writing also appears on About.com, DVDVerdict.com and fthismovie.net, the site he runs and hosts a weekly podcast.
He has been an obsessive fan of horror and genre films his entire life, watching, re-watching and studying everything from the Universal Monsters of the '30s and '40s to the modern explosion of indie horror. Some of his favorites include Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931), Dawn of the Dead (1978), John Carpenter's The Thing and The Funhouse. He is a lover of Tobe Hooper and his favorite Halloween film is part 4. He knows how you feel about that. He has a great wife and two cool kids, who he hopes to raise as horror nerds.
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