#95: Kill, Baby, Kill!
Italofilm legend Mario Bava brings gothic horror back to giallo
This review was originally posted to Twitter on April 28, 2019.
Initial release: July 8, 1966
Director: Mario Bava
Western cinema owes a lot to Italy, which was where many of the most important films of the 60s and 70s were shot, the concept of the spaghetti western was invented, and giallo, especially, developed to have a transformative effect on horror cinema. While the early prototypical ideas for giallo go back to Alfred Hitchcock, the codification of the subgenre can be traced to one man: Mario Bava. While giallo is more closely associated with Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, it was Bava a decade before them who gave us the seminal Black Sunday and quasi-Alien-prototype flick Planet of the Vampires. Lesser known but just as important is this smart gothic tale, Kill, Baby, Kill, sometimes seen as marking the end of the golden age of giallo film due to it being the last of the era to see wide international distribution.
It’s 1907, and Dr. Paul Eswai is sent to a remote village in the Carpathians to perform an autopsy on the body of a young woman who was impaled on a fence. The locals are suspicious and superstitious, and rather keen on making sure Dr. Eswai doesn’t perform the autopsy. It soon becomes clear that a strange young blonde girl is seemingly stalking the locals, and that everyone who claims to see her soon ends up dead. Dr. Eswai, however, has no time for ghost stories or folk medicine, and is determined to science his way into a solution. This dichotomy of science vs superstition is a common subtext in gothic fiction, made more obvious in this case by the doctor’s ideological opposite, Ruth, the town sorceress, who administers folk remedies as protection against the vengeful dead.
What’s interesting is that it’s Ruth, not Dr. Eswei, who saves the day; while he’s ostensibly the hero who unravels the mystery, Ruth knows all along what’s going on, and at the film’s climax, it’s she who settles the matter once and for all.
It’s interesting how Bava took the gothic tropes of “pure innocent child in white” and “evil witch in black” and stood them on their heads; the little girl reeks malevolence, and Ruth is unquestionably on the side of the angels, albeit it hasn’t made her less dour and serious.
This film is classic Bava, drawing on his experiences filming Black Sunday; it’s a sharp mix of gothic horror (filming it in the ancient town of Calcata, Italy gives it a nice, creepy quasi-Transylvanian vibe) bordering on German Expressionism, shot through with colorful lighting to give it that classic 60s lurid quality. It’s got everything you need for a quality haunting: a lantern-jawed hero, a gorgeous blonde heroine, sinister happenings, paranoid locals, the works. As bodies start piling up and Dr. Eswei gets closer to the truth, things start taking an almost hallucinatory quality. Easily the best scene in the whole film is a wild sequence, resembling something out of Twin Peaks, where Dr. Eswei is chasing after the female love interest. He finds himself running through the same room over and over again, and eventually catches up with himself! It’s absolutely bonkers and was not at all expected.
For a film that was done with an incomplete script and almost no money (funds ran out two weeks into filming, and cast and crew stayed on out of loyalty to Bava) this is a brilliant, pioneering piece of work that transcends its campy schlock trappings.
