HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON: Mario Bava at a Crossroads

As the film that bridges the two decades of Mario Bava’s output as a director, 1970’s Hatchet for the Honeymoon feels strangely trapped between two worlds. It contains the traces of gothic horror with which Bava made his name, as well as elements of the supernatural and the psychosexual leanings of the giallo genre he more or less helped create. At the same time, it’s steeped in dazzling colors and psychedelia—it feels seedier than his usual output even though it’s far less graphic than some of his other works.

Stephen Forsyth plays John Harrington, working at a bridal dress factory managed by his older wife, Mildred (Laura Betti), with whom he shares very little love. He has a proclivity for watching young women wear bridal gowns and then murdering them; one day, however, he meets and gradually falls in love with Helen (Dagmar Lassandar), one of the new models in his employ. When a fight with Mildred turns ugly, John murders her and attempts to dispose of the body, but she keeps reappearing to him as a ghostly reminder of his crime. John continues his relationship with Helen and attempts to carry on his killing spree, but suddenly discovers that he can’t.

This inability for John to murder gets to the heart of Hatchet for the Honeymoon, which is very much a movie about impotent masculinity. John cannot perform sexually even as the film opens, which is precisely why he commits the murders to begin with—like Norman Bates in Psycho, killing takes the place of sex for John, who has to make do with penetrating women with a weapon when his own body won’t function. And, like Norman Bates, it all goes back to his mother. Seeing his mother sleeping with another man as a child triggered a psychotic break and he killed both her and her new partner with a hatchet. This Oedipal connection is what allows him to continue killing as an adult man married to Mildred; not only is she older than him, but she also tells him what to do and nags when she disapproves. She is, essentially, a surrogate mother, so when she is removed from the picture after her death, that bond is severed and John is rendered impotent yet again – both sexually and homicidally.

This connection between sex and death, between past trauma and present transgressions, provides the driving force behind a majority of giallo films. While Hatchet for the Honeymoon doesn’t entirely qualify as such, it is certainly informed by a number of the tropes Bava himself helped codify, first in The Evil Eye (aka The Girl Who Knew Too Much) and again in Blood and Black Lace. It is built around the murders of beautiful women, many of them models, and photographed in such a way so as to emphasize the style of the production design, the costumes, the superficial glamour of what exists before the camera lens. Unlike the traditional giallo built around the mystery of who is committing the murders, however, we know the killer of Hatchet for the Honeymoon from the opening scene in which he murders a couple aboard a train and announces in voiceover narration that he is mad. This makes the movie more of a character study than a traditional giallo, as here the murders are committed in order to discover the truth of a traumatic memory that John has repressed. Bava is more interested in the killer than in those being killed.

But for as much as Hatchet for the Honeymoon pulls from Bava’s past filmography (even the appearance of Mildred’s ghost recalls the spirit of Christopher Lee returning from beyond the grave in The Whip and the Body), it also helps predict his career through the rest of the 1970s. This was the decade during which Bava would move away from his gothic roots and begin to embrace different approaches to horror, be it the possession-inspired madness of Lisa and the Devil (particularly in the U.S. edit released under the title The House of Exorcism) or the proto-slasher A Bay of Blood. The deliberate use of a fluid camera would give way to a camera that moves mostly when zooming in or out. His use of color changed, too, from the richness of his earlier works to a more psychedelic, even garish, palette. In this regard, Hatchet for the Honeymoon marks something of a turning point in the director’s filmography.

Though not a success upon release, Hatchet for the Honeymoon eventually fell into the public domain after failing to secure mainstream distribution; as such, its easy access meant it became the film that first exposed many a horror fan to the genius of Mario Bava. Though spared the massive recuts that would affect a number of his movies – it is, after all, both sexless and bloodless, its psychological complexities the only aspect to which anyone with censoring authority might object – the movie was pretty badly mistreated in the U.S., not getting a proper home video release until it was rescued by a Kino Lorber Blu-ray in 2012. As part of the special features on that disc, critic and author Tim Lucas, the world’s foremost expert on Mario Bava and his films, cites Hatchet for the Honeymoon as being the director’s most personal movie. That makes it Bava’s Vertigo as much as his Psycho in that it finds the filmmaker working through some of his own issues – why he has spent a career staging the murders of women and what those images have helped him unlock within his own psyche.

Though often categorized as “lesser” Bava, Hatchet for the Honeymoon represents a pivotal moment in the master’s career. In addition to being more introspective than his previous work, it’s the movie that reshaped his mise en scène and, like Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom before it, led to the sub-genre of movies about killers in which the killer is the protagonist. There’s hardly anything “lesser” about it.

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The Whip and the Body 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.