When a filmmaker creates a number of movies that qualify for masterpiece status, it becomes nearly impossible to quantifiably conclude which one stands above the rest as his or her single greatest achievement. We have our favorites, of course, but can any of us really name which of Hitchcock’s films is his definitive best? Or Kurosawa’s? Or Spielberg’s? The same is true of Mario Bava, the great Italian director who made films across a number of genres but who is best known for his work in horror. How does one name a single “best” movie from the man responsible for Black Sunday and Blood and Black Lace and The Whip and the Body and Black Sabbath? It’s like naming a favorite child.
While his 1966 movie Kill, Baby... Kill! isn’t always named as being one of Bava’s best, it absolutely deserves to be part of the conversation and is, in the interest of full disclosure, my favorite of his works. Arguably the greatest “killer kid” movie of all time, the gothic ghost story stars Giacomo Rossi-Stuart as a doctor who comes to a small village in the mountains of Eastern Europe to perform an autopsy on a woman who recently died a mysterious death. Upon arriving, however, he discovers that the town is under a curse, haunted by the ghost of a seven-year old girl who condemns anyone who sees her to death (a plot conceit that would resonate through both the Japanese horror film Ringu and its American remake The Ring). As the doctor continues to deny the possibility of the supernatural, he is drawn further in to a world of witchcraft, evil spirits, and a rising body count.
Kill, Baby... Kill! finds Bava coming back to gothic horror after a three-year detour into giallo, science fiction and historical adventure, and he returns like a man possessed. Every signifier of the sub-genre has been turned up almost beyond its breaking point, meaning every exterior shot is flooded with fog and every interior drenched in inky black shadow. The sounds of creaking doors and the disembodied laughter of children fill the landscape. Cinematographer Antonio Rinaldi, a regular collaborator of Bava who also shot Planet of the Vampires, Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs and Danger: Diabolik for the director, captures all the movie’s moody darkness and makes every frame breathtakingly beautiful. One of Bava’s greatest gifts as a filmmaker (and former cinematographer) is just how concerned he is with the aesthetics of his horror movies; hardly anyone has ever made such pretty nightmares. Kill, Baby... Kill! is one of his prettiest…and one of his most nightmarish.
Beyond the gorgeousness of the atmosphere, what makes Kill, Baby... Kill! one of Bava’s best is the attention the director pays to disorienting the viewer; like Rossi-Stuart’s protagonist, we are dislocated, disconnected from the rules and rationale of the physical world. The movie is loaded with repeating imagery that makes it difficult to get our bearings: an early POV shot of a child on a swing not only changes the camera’s perspective with unexpected suddenness (it’s one of the only first-person shots in the movie), but the movement as it swings back and forth is nearly impossible to understand until the child’s legs can be glimpsed in the frame. It’s a technique that Bava and DP Rinaldi return to throughout the movie, displacing the viewer momentarily and then returning us to some degree of normalcy.
At times, even that is then stripped away, too, as in the scene in which the Baroness Graps (Giana Vivaldi) hears what she believes to be the sounds of seven-year old Melissa: she is shown staring into a mirror in a wide shot, at which point the camera pans over to her reflection before zooming into a closeup and finally ending on the mirror again as the image distorts and fractures until it can no longer be made out. Another scene sees the camera doing a rapid zoom towards Melissa’s ghost and then immediately zooming back out, a visual representation of the doctor’s approaching the truth about what is really happening in the town but then retreating back to the safety of what he understands.
As with several of Bava’s horror films, Kill, Baby... Kill! considers themes of the past and its ability to wreak havoc on the present. In Black Sunday, it is the execution of a witch hundreds of years prior that is revisited upon a village when she is resurrected and looking for a measure of revenge. Hatchet for the Honeymoon looks at how past childhood trauma manifests itself in adulthood. The Whip and the Body examines the horror of past relationships resurfacing for its female protagonist. Kill, Baby... Kill! has horrors buried in the past as well, but what sets it apart from Bava’s other supernatural efforts is that it combines these ghostly elements with shades of mystery, meaning the truth of who Melissa is or how her spirit may or may not be responsible for the current string of murders is not immediately revealed. What that truth is, I won’t say, except to point out that it isn’t just the lovemaking shish kebab from A Bay of Blood isn’t the only time that the producers of Friday the 13th heavily “borrowed” from Bava.
With its heavy gothic trappings, its inventive photography, its painfully gorgeous photography and a huge amount of creep factor, Kill, Baby... Kill! is Bava at his very best. Though it was one of his more successful efforts upon its original release, the film has fallen through the cracks a bit on home video thanks to some rights disputes that held up its release. Thankfully, it has recently received a 2K restoration in celebration of its fiftieth anniversary and will be making its way to high definition in both the U.S. (courtesy of Kino Lorber) and the UK from Arrow Video, whose special edition treatments of Bava’s films are the definitive releases available on the market. For fans of Bava or of gothic horror, this is life-changing news. The director’s most beautiful film can at long last be seen at its beautiful best.
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A new 2K restoration of Kill, Baby... Kill! is screening as part of the 21-film Mario Bava series taking place at New York City’s Quad Cinema July 14th–25th. 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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