Mario Bava - vo.rs

Mario Bava: The Father of Italian Horror

Thu, 07 May 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Almost everything that Italian horror became, Mario Bava did first. The giallo murder mystery with its black-gloved killer — his. The body-count structure where a masked figure works through a cast of victims — his, more than a decade before American slashers made it a formula. The idea that horror could be built from saturated, unreal colour rather than shadow and restraint — his above all. And he did it while regarded, for most of his life, as a talented technician rather than an artist, a man who fixed other directors’ films and never quite got his due. The reappraisal came late, and it has to run up against Bava’s own modesty, because he genuinely seemed to think of himself as a craftsman doing a job.

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.

Danger: Diabolik: Bava's Pop-Art Crime Fantasia

Wed, 28 May 2025 11:00:00 +0000

For years the widest audience Danger: Diabolik ever reached met it as a punchline, the film being pulled apart in the final episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 in 1999. That is a strange fate for one of the most purely beautiful things Mario Bava ever made, and it says more about how the world lost track of Bava than about the film. Watch it clean, without the silhouettes and the wisecracks, and Danger: Diabolik reveals itself as a pop-art dream: a comic-book heist fantasia conjured, in 1968, out of coloured gels, forced perspective, a masterful cutting rhythm and almost no money at all.