Blood and Black Lace: Bava Invents the Body Count

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Every slasher film owes a debt to a fashion house in Rome in 1964. Blood and Black Lace, released in Italy as Sei donne per l’assassino, “Six Women for the Murderer”, is the film where Mario Bava assembled the parts that half a century of horror would keep re-using: a faceless killer in gloves, a set of glamorous victims, deaths staged as the film’s central spectacle rather than its interruptions, and a plot that exists mainly to hang murders on. It borrowed and recombined elements already floating through crime fiction and gothic cinema, fused them into a single template, and the template held.

Rosemary's Baby: The Horror of Being Not Believed

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 08:00:00 +0000

There is a devil in Rosemary’s Baby, and a coven of Satanists, and eventually a cradle draped in black with an upside-down crucifix hanging over it. None of that is what the film is about. What the film is about is a young woman telling the people around her that something is wrong, over and over, in a rising register of politeness and panic, and being smiled at and medicated and sent home. Roman Polanski’s 1968 film — his first made in America, adapted with almost fanatical fidelity from Ira Levin’s bestseller — is the definitive horror film about gaslighting, made two decades before the word entered common use. The Satanism is the alibi. The horror is the not-being-believed.

1960s Horror - vo.rs

Blood and Black Lace: Bava Invents the Body Count

Rosemary's Baby: The Horror of Being Not Believed