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KILL, BABY... KILL!

This is one of Mario Bava's greatest films, a subtle, strange, melodramatic and expertly crafted ghost story steeped in Gothic terror. It's set-bound atmospherics give it a certain theatricality and weirdness that helps lift it out of it's penny-ante roots and into the stuff of legend. KILL, BABY... KILL! manages to both terrify and dazzle, it's smoothly gliding camera work immediately catches the eye while it's dark, ever-shifting look sneaks through and torments your subconscious. If this sounds like too much praise for a single film, it isn't. There are not enough words in the English language - perhaps in the whole of language - for that.

The plot of KILL, BABY... KILL! is it's only weak link and that is solely because it is entirely perfunctory and somewhat stale. Paul, a doctor, has been summoned to a small, secluded and decaying town to assist a police inspector. Several people have died in the recent weeks, all under mysterious circumstances. The villagers are convinced these people died because of a curse laid upon the town. Paul and the inspector are not convinced. Paul begins his leg of the investigation by performing an autopsy on the most recently dead, a young woman who threw herself onto a spiked gate. Assisted by another outsider - Monica, a beautiful young woman who has returned to the village to pay her respects to her dead parents, servants at a foreboding villa who had given her up as a baby - Paul begins the autopsy. He finds a small silver coin lodged in the heart of the corpse. The police inspector soon goes missing and the strange occurrences are beginning to ramp up. Paul travels to the villa to find the inspector only to come into contact with a young child named Melissa. When he returns to town, he is told that the curse placed on the town is the result of the death of a girl, the same little girl Paul witnessed at the villa, the little girl named Melissa.

Plot has never seemed to matter to Mario Bava. While his films were never really dull, lightweight or empty-headed, the narratives in his films often gave way to stylistic flourishes and moments of inspired theatricality. Much of KILL, BABY... KILL! is slow and stately with long stretches of tracking shots and edits with little to no action to speak of. Bava's desire to sacrifice narrative at the altar of style would seem to be an unwise choice but the film is better for it. A lesser filmmaker would have relied upon scene after scene of extraneous exposition to explain the scenario. Bava does it through carefully planned camera work and tight, sparce editing. Paul's first encounter with Melissa would have played much differently in the hands of virtually any other filmmaker. With Bava behind camera, this simple scenario involving a corridor, a spiral staircase and a bouncing ball becomes unbearably creepy and unforgettable.

At times, I wanted to kill the speakers on my television and watch the film in absolute silence. I simply didn't want to be distracted from the beauty of the film. There are so many memorable moments in KILL, BABY... KILL! that to list them all would take up several pages. My favorite piece comes late in the film. Paul and Monica have gone back to the villa to question the crazy old woman that still lives there. Having learned the awful secret of the village curse, Monica goes missing. Paul take off after, running into another room and then out the far door. Bava replays the scene multiple times. The second or third time the scene is replayed, Paul sees a man running out the door moments after he enters. The scene replays itself, Paul running into and out of the exact same room over and over again, until he catches up with the figure in front of him. In a shock cut, we see that the man Paul has been chasing is himself. Paul recoils and we can feel his entire world, grounded in science and reason, begin to collapse around him. He backs into a wall adorned with spider webs and a mural of the villa. A simple cut later, we are outside the castle with Paul in foreground, covered in spider webs, and the villa in the background. With nothing more than creative editing, framing and directing, Bava has enacted a fever dream right before our very eyes and through his precise execution, has pulled from underneath us the comforting ground of reality.

KILL, BABY... KILL! is full of wonderful moments like that and it is honestly scary, something many films of this kind are not. It's influence has been felt in the films of Scorsese and Fellini, both of whom borrowed Bava's ghost image for their own films - the devil that visits Christ at the end of Scorsese's THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST and the devil in Fellini's TOBY DAMMIT are both direct references to the ghost girl in KILL, BABY... KILL! - and beyond. Though the pessimism found in Bava's later films isn't really prevalent, the tone of KILL, BABY... KILL! is rather stifling and oppressive. Thankfully, it's presentation is entirely thrilling. This is one of those films that is simply fun to watch. It's like a gaudy haunted house ride at a local amusement park that managed to make you scream while still being exhilarating. It's a classic film, one of the best horror films to come out of Italy and a must-see for anyone interesting in horror films or beautiful cinematic art.

One of the greatest films I've ever seen.