Times New Keeferton

The other night, I watched Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace. It was recommended to me a few years ago by my friend Jeremy, who was taken aback and shocked that I had never seen it. I swore to him that I would watch it at the first available opportunity. A couple months after that, I started watching it, and then fell asleep after about twenty minutes or so. I don’t know if it turned me off because of the subtitles, or because of the slow and dramatic storytelling, or what. Having now seen it in its entirety, I absolutely cannot believe that I fell asleep during this movie.

Because this movie is great.

The version that I watched was most likely German in origin, hence the title (which translates to “Bloody Silk,” apparently).

I have made the mistake of assuming that Bava was a lesser director. In all of my thinking about Italian horror in general, I’ve always been an Argento man through-and-through (primarily because of Suspiria, which is one of the greatest horror movies ever made). After Argento came Lucio Fulci (primarily for Zombie, but also The Beyond and The House By the Cemetary). I’m not sure why I thought that– maybe because the only Bava I’d seen was Danger: Diabolik, which is a masterpiece, but of a different stripe altogether.

Blood and Black Lace is throwing my “Italian Horror Directors” ranking list into total disarray. You can see a whole lot of Bava in Argento– there are a lot of direct correlations between this movie and the Argento movies I discussed previously, which came out a half-dozen years after this. Hell, there are a lot of direct correlations between this movie and Suspiria: the use of color, the use of pacing, the use of specific emotional cues among the murder set-pieces.

This movie sort of laid the foundation for a lot of my favorite horror movies of this style and type: it’s slow and brutal and absolutely beautiful.

The plot is almost circumstantial. An Italian fashion and design house is filled with administrators, models, designers, and fabricators. Their personal lives are riddled with vice and misdeeds: drug abuse and trafficking, surreptitious abortions, adultery, mounting unpaid debts, corruption, and blackmail.

The design house is also beautiful in and of itself. Among the white wicker dress forms, there are mannequins in deep bleeding red; everything’s filled with supersaturated colors, and everyone casts an ominous shadow.

One of the young and beautiful models, Isabella, has been keeping a diary. In this diary, she’s been keeping records of all of her coworkers’ horrible transgressive societal taboos, complete with names, dates, and all the grisly details. Because of course you would do that, right– maintain a running tally of all your acquaintances’ shameful secrets? What could go wrong?

She’s murdered for it, of course– within the first five minutes of the movie. By a person wearing black leather gloves, a long trench coat, and a flesh-colored mask that covers all his features. Think Rorschach without the patterns, and flesh-colored. So, think The Question, if your comic-book knowledge runs that deep.

Pretty stylish choices, anonymous murderer. Pretty stylish choices, Mario Bava.

While the fashion house is preparing for their next show, and in full view of literally everyone else in the house, Nicole finds Isabella’s diary. Peggy takes it out of her purse and runs off with it. After the show, Nicole drives to an antique shop owned by her lover. There’s a knock at the door. Nicole answers it, and the murderer rushes through, searching for the diary, and chases her around.

Bava’s directorial talents are on full display here. Nicole is chased through what appears to be a massive medieval warehouse full of beautiful antiques, many of which are amazingly colorful and fascinating. Some of the lightbulbs are apparently purple, some are green. Some are deep red. There’s a beautiful shot where Nicole runs up some stairs and the camera follows her up– it looks like a crane shot– and the colors shift with the movement. The chase scene is full of amazing moments.

That crane shot, by the way– not actually a crane shot. In my research about this movie to write this blog, I found a bit about this chase scene, which claimed that Bava didn’t have much of a budget and had to improvise– so he used a child’s little red wagon for tracking shots, and a “see-saw mechanism” for crane shots. The scene goes on for a very long time, and manages to maintain suspense throughout. Nicole finally manages to get into a hallway and make it to the front door, which she begins to unlock–

Surprise! The murderer has somehow managed to silently put on a full coat of medieval plate armor, including the helmet. Nicole gets a weird medieval three-pronged murderglove to the face! The murderer searches her, but the diary is nowhere to be found.

While all this is happening, Peggy has taken the diary home. All her secrets are in it as well as everyone else’s, so she throws it into her fireplace and turns it into ashes. Whew! Crisis averted!

Right? Crisis averted, guys?

Oh no, wait. The masked figure bursts in on her, roughs her up, and demands the diary. She says she burned it, but he doesn’t believe her, so the roughing-up continues. The police arrive during his interrogation, so he slings her over his shoulder and hauls her off to some undisclosed location. He demands the diary again, she again tells him that she burned it. So, of course, he presses her face against a red-hot furnace and then kills her.

The police have found Nicole’s body by this point, so they know there’s a definite pattern of murder here. They’ve also uncovered a little bit about the drugs. They round up a bunch of suspects and hold them in custody.

Greta, another girl, drives home from the fashion house. Once she gets there, she hears a strange noise coming from the back of her car. She opens the trunk, and Peggy’s burned-ass face rolls out. The camera holds on it for a long time as the wind blows through her hair. It’s oddly beautiful.

Instead of calling the police, the way you or I would, Greta chooses a different path. Remember, she’s carrying the burden of a whole pocketful of destructive personal secrets. I’m not positive about this, but I believe she was part of the drug trafficking ring? She helped one of the male designers keep himself all smacked up all the time? Anyway, she’s racked with secrets!

Remember that part about the plot being secondary to the visuals and murder set-pieces?

Greta slowly, clumsily, awkwardly puts her arms under poor dead Peggy’s arms, hoists her out of the trunk, and carries her into the house. The camera doesn’t cut or look away for any of this, even when Greta tries to maneuver the body up a set of stairs, stumbles, and drops it.

The murderous set-pieces in this movie are two things. They are brutal and they are beautiful.

They are brutal in that there is zero titillation to really be had. You can’t really watch these murders rapt with glee, enjoying the choreography and violence. Bava’s nearly Hitchcockian in his reluctance to show actual violence, preferring short quick cuts; he’ll draw out the lead-up to violence, and he’ll linger on the horrible aftermath, but he doesn’t spend a whole lot of time on the actual moment-to-moment gore. Far from being a disappointment, this ends up being the merciful choice. The violence itself– not the lead-up, not the aftermath– is extremely unpleasant. I found myself wincing more than once, and even looking away. When Peggy’s face hits that red-hot furnace, the shot is from the back of her head, and it lasts maybe half a second, but holy shit, it packs some hellacious impact. When Greta stumbles and drops that body, the camera doesn’t even flinch. So brutal.

They are beautiful in their lead-up and aftermath. That ornate, lingering chase through the antique shop. Peggy’s hair blowing in the wind. The dappled moonlight scattering on Isabella’s face through the leaves. It’s beautiful and horrible.

When Tao-Li (yet another beautiful model) gets drowned in the bathtub, and then has her wrists slashed to make it look like suicide, it’s eerie and slow and beautiful:

Even this horrible shot, showing the corpses of Peggy and Greta (oh yeah, she gets murdered too), is beautiful in its eerie composition, coloring, and framing.

I was deeply impressed with Blood and Black Lace. I’ve decided that I need to familiarize myself with Mario Bava’s catalog further– so y’all can look forward to more entries about him in the near future.

I really can’t stress enough how creepy, beautiful, and well-directed this movie is.

I think this might be my last giallo for a while. I was getting a bit burned out, and with this masterpiece, I think the binge has reached its inevitable end. The giallo run is going out on a high note.

It’s time for another Giallo! For some reason, I’ve really been digging on these. A little more subtle than slashers, a little more gory than thrillers. This go-round, I watched Paolo Cavara’s The Black Belly of the Tarantula. Someone somewhere claimed that this is the best giallo ever made, and I had to test this theory. I found that I disagreed, but I did enjoy the movie a whole hell of a lot. Like the Argento gialli I detailed in my last blog entry, this one was also scored by Ennio Morricone. Dude got around.

The “plot” of this movie is basically just connecting tissue to string together the murder and nudity set-pieces. A sex-crazy she-dame who frequents a particular salon is murdered thusly: a thick acupuncture needle coated in a paralytic is jammed into her neck, leaving her paralyzed but aware. Then a knife is plunged into her belly, and she’s disemboweled while apparently feeling every excruciating second of it.

It turns out she was being blackmailed for her wacky sex-desires and adultery! Then another woman is murdered in exactly the same way. This one was a drug dealer, and was also being blackmailed. Lo, a pattern emerges! The hunt for the sex-crazed psychopath is afoot! A police inspector with an awesome 1970s moustache is on the case.

The reason for the title– and the supposed corollary to the murderer’s methodology– is the behavior of the tarantula hawk wasp, which is described by Wikipedia thusly:

The female tarantula hawk captures, stings, and paralyzes the spider, then either drags her prey back into her own burrow or transports it to a specially prepared nest, where a single egg is laid on the spider’s abdomen, and the entrance is covered… When the wasp larva hatches, it creates a small hole in the spider’s abdomen, then enters and feeds voraciously, avoiding vital organs for as long as possible to keep the spider alive. After several weeks, the larva pupates. Finally, the wasp becomes an adult, and emerges from the spider’s abdomen to continue the life cycle.

Which is really, truly, awful. That’s right up there with the old dream of being not able to move but being totally aware as the coroner starts his autopsy on you. Or being buried alive and awake and unable to tell anyone about it. These are old tropes for a reason– they still scare the unholy crap out of people. Anyway, the movie explains this reasoning in an amazing sequence where it actually shows the tarantula hawk wasp straight-up fighting a tarantula and then beginning the horrifying larva-depositing sequence:

The husband of the first victim, a suspect in both murders, decides that he needs to prove his innocence, and so begins his own hunt for the murderer. He hires a private eye, and tracks down the photographer who was blackmailing both women, and his girlfriend, who is the more vicious (and smart) of the two.

This leads to a straight-up incredible rooftop struggle scene, and the photographer shoves the first victim’s husband, culminating in what can only be described as a truly beautiful and wondrous example of the “camera following a person to their horrible gruesome falling death” shot.

God, I love these.

Anyway, the photographer is found dead. Then his girlfriend, the other half of the blackmailing duo, is also found brutally murdered. Jenny, a masseuse at the spa from the beginning of the film, is also found murdered. The hits just keep on coming! The photography, by the way, is pretty nice. Jenny’s corpse is found dead by the garbage man, who tears open a trash bag and finds her gazing skyward beatifically, like some wayward blackmailing trash-Saint:

The inspector, beginning to believe that there’s something going on with the spa, goes there and discovers yet another dead lady! SO MANY DEAD LADIES, YOU GUYS.

It becomes apparent that the murderer is now targeting the Inspector’s girlfriend. He rushes to his apartment, finds her paralyzed in bed, and confronts the murderer.

He does this by dropping his gun, staring at the murderer for a really long time, and then allowing me to create perhaps the greatest gif so far this year:

The Black Belly of the Tarantula was pretty good. Three and a half stars out of five. It would be rated higher, but there’s no real mystery that the viewer can follow along– there are no clues, as such, meaning that the ultimate reveal of the murderer is basically meaningless. As a string of set-pieces, however, it’s great; and Morricone’s score really enhances the whole thing.

So, I realized I was falling a bit behind in my #31DaysOfHorror. Over a couple of days I just went all-out Giallo-style.

Giallo movies, if you’re unfamiliar, are basically a combination of slasher movies and murder mysteries. They were pretty popular in the 1970s, and were primarily a product of Italian directors. “Giallo” is Italian for “yellow,” which is a reference to the yellowing paper of pulp fiction paperbacks, usually crime and horror stuff.

I started off by watching a trio of Dario Argento gialli. I’m a huge Argento fan, although nearly everything I’ve seen came from the middle period of his career, and aren’t really gialli, because they have supernatural elements. I’m talking primarily here about Suspiria, one of the best and most beautiful horror films ever made; although also Phemomena. (Tangentially, he also had a pretty big career in Westerns. He wrote Once Upon a Time in the West.) The three I watched (in one sitting, because I am a crazy person) are the ones that comprise his Animals trilogy (not really a trilogy; so-named because they came sequentially, and each had an animal in the title).

They are, in chronological release order: The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, Cat O’Nine Tails, and Four Flies on Grey Velvet. It’s worth noting that all three of these movies were scored by Ennio Morricone, which is fucking awesome. Anyway. Let’s get into it.

Our protagonist is Sam, an American writer who moved to Rome to try and get his mojo back. He’s been writing birdwatching guides, but he’s not happy about it. He’s found a nice Italian girl, and he’s bought some plane tickets to return to America with her, but (wouldn’t you know it) fate gets in the way. He sees two people struggling in an art gallery. A woman is stabbed. He rushes to save her, but the killer closes and locks him in the glass-encased foyer, so he’s forced to stand there helpless and watch her writhe around in pain.

This shit is pure Argento, and is beautifully done. The weird angular ceiling pattern, the helplessness as Sam pounds on the glass; I’m not including them here to attempt some weird form of brevity, but there are all these lingering shots of the bloodied woman reaching up and beckoning for help, while our hero can do nothing. It’s pretty great.

Sam finally gets a bystander to call the police, who rush to the scene. The woman survives. The police tell Sam that she’s the fourth victim in a series of brutal attacks on ladies, and she’s the first survivor. They take his passport (because it’s awful fishy that he was there in the first place), and he slowly gets wrapped up in the proceedings. He gets his mojo back, and he worms his way into the police investigation, lending a hand and actually doing some investigating.

There’s a great recurring bit where he converses with an imprisoned pimp. One of his girls was murdered, so he wants the killer caught as well. He has a bad stuttering problem, and the way that he gets around it is by ending every sentence with “so long” in order to short stop the stuttering. He’s also got eyes like Marty Feldman. It’s fantastic.

There are also some more murders, including some fantastic set pieces.

Of the three Argento gialli I watched, this was the second best. Four stars out of five.

Let’s move on.

Ugh.

This one was pretty crappy, to be honest. Karl Malden plays a blind guy taking care of his young niece. They live across the street from some weird genetic testing and research facility. Being a blind dude, Karl Malden can hear things, like a fella talking about blackmail. There’s a break-in at the facility, and then some murders start happening,

There are still some pretty good bits, including a dude getting shoved in front of a train:

And then horribly dying under that train.

There’s also a pretty great showdown at the end, where a fella gets pushed through an angular-glass skylight, which is just magnificently well done, and foreshadows some of Argento’s best work (in Suspiria).

Overall, not that great. Two stars out of five.

Let’s move on again.

A young man is a drummer in a band. He keeps seeing an older gentleman following him– guy with a moustache, hat, dark glasses. For weeks, he keeps catching glimpses of this fellow following him around. Eventually, he chases the guy to a beautifully-decorated post-celebration abandoned theater, and demands that the guy tell him what the hell he wants. It goes just swimmingly.

They struggle. In the ensuing pandemonium, our protagonist stabs the stalker with his own switchblade. Immediately upon the man’s final groan, the house lights come up and a terrifying figure in a terrifying mask takes a bunch of photographs of the action. The whole thing is masterfully shot and edited.

Our hero, a murderer, starts receiving little threats of blackmail. At a party, he discovers a photograph of him stabbing the man mixed in with his LP records. He wakes up in the middle of the night and a masked figure wraps a cord around his neck and tells him that although he won’t be murdered tonight, he will be soon. Also, throughout the movie, our hero has these horrifying dreams relating to a story that someone told at the party. In the dream, he’s beheaded horribly in some middle eastern square:

Anyway, our hero’s wife leaves, saying that she feels unsafe. Her cousin Dalia comes to visit, and she and the protagonist get up to shenanigans, because Italian movie in the 1970s. Until, at one point, the murderer swoops out of nowhere and slashes Dalia’s head and she topples down the stairs, leading to the part of the movie where I said “Oh god, that’s awful!”

Eventually our hero faces off against the villain. The motivations are byzantine and kind of hilarious, and the camerawork is impressive (including, apparently, the very first time ultra-high-speed film was used to show a bullet in flight).

This one was really, really good. Five out of five stars.

#31DaysOfHorror continues!

A couple nights ago, I watched Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu: The Vampyre.

I’d never seen it before, and honestly, I’m sort of woefully ignorant when it comes to Herzog in general– this is only the third movie of his I’ve ever seen (although the first, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, is undeniably a masterpiece). I haven’t seen Fitzcarraldo, or Aguirre: Wrath of God, or even Grizzly Man.

At least now I’ve seen Nosferatu.

I’m glad I finally did. This movie is beautiful in a lot of ways. The pacing is so deliberate as to be almost oppressive, with minute-long shots of rolling clouds and flapping bats. The shooting locations are gorgeous in every instance, and Herzog really has an eye for framing and lighting. The entire movie just oozes ambiance.

The color palette is muted and beautiful, and in keeping with (what I imagine) the historical look and feel of the Carpathian mountains (and the wee villages therein) would actually have been: muted beiges, browns, slate stone.

There are a number of absolutely gorgeous set-pieces: sumptuous feasts that appear unbidden (and apparently unprepared by human hands); Harker and Renfield’s real-estate offices, brimming with dusty books and papers; Count Dracula’s run-down and semi-abandoned castle, which has this beautiful clock in it:

Of course, Klaus Kinski is amazing and disgusting and terrifying.

The movie is quite literally a retelling of Dracula, so it seems a bit pointless to get in here and break down the plot points and story arc. Where the movie really shines is just in Herzog’s eye, the fantastic acting, the costume and set design, and the fantastic new-age soundtrack by Popul Vuh.

And the rats.

This movie has so many rats in it, you guys.

The reason I decided to watch this movie, after being aware of it and not watching it for two decades, is that this last weekend, the aforementioned incredible soundtrack came out as a double-LP gatefold on Waxwork Records. It is packaged in an absolutely gorgeous manner.

The art is by one of my favorite artists of all time, Jessica Seamans. She also did the interior gatefold art, which was also published this last weekend as a limited edition giclee print called “Opfer der Pest,” by THE VACVVM. She even did these beautiful little bats on the sticker labels of the B-sides of each of the LPs. I’m a total fanboy for her art– I have about a dozen of her art prints, and a small handful of her original art (including a piece for which I have some kind of ridiculous framing plans).

I love this record. I love this soundtrack. I was afraid the movie would be crummy.

I needn’t have worried.