KILL, BABY, KILL 1966
Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby, Kill (1966) is a feverish, color-saturated reverie—one of the purest distillations of Gothic horror ever committed to film, and a testament to Bava’s singular vision as both director and visual architect. Set in a remote, fog-drenched Carpathian village at the turn of the 20th century, the story follows Dr. Paul Eswai (Giacomo Rossi Stuart), summoned to perform an autopsy on a young woman who has died under mysterious, violent circumstances. He is joined by the luminous Erika Blanc as Monica, a medical student haunted by her own ties to the village, and Fabienne Dali as Ruth, the enigmatic witch whose rituals seem to offer the only line of defense against the supernatural plague gripping the townsfolk.
Bava, who began his career as a cinematographer, suffuses every frame with a painter’s eye for color and composition. The film’s visual language is a delirium of hallucinatory hues—emerald greens, bruised purples, and candlelit golds swirl through the crumbling corridors of Villa Graps, where the ghost of Melissa, a flaxen-haired child in white, presides over the living and the dead alike. The cinematography, credited to Antonio Rinaldi (Planet of the Vampire 1965, Danger: Diabolik 1968, Four Dolls for an August Moon 1970) is both lush and uncanny, with Bava himself orchestrating much of the camera work: snap-zooms heighten the shocks, while slow, gliding movements turn the village and its haunted mansion into a waking nightmare.
The motif of the evil child—Melissa Graps, played with chilling stillness by Valerio Valeri (actually a young male actor)—anchors the film’s most iconic sequences. Her presence is often heralded by the sight and sound of a white ball bouncing through the gloom, a symbol of innocence curdled into menace. Bava reveals her in fragments: a pale hand pressed to a window, the flash of white stockings on a staircase, the impassive face framed by golden hair and fixed, glassy eyes. The white ball becomes a harbinger of doom, preceding suicides and spectral visitations, and Melissa’s appearances are woven into the film’s dream logic—sometimes she is glimpsed as a doll among other broken toys, sometimes as a vision in a labyrinth of mirrors and doors, always blurring the line between reality and nightmare.
The screenplay, credited to Bava, Romano Migliorini, and Roberto Natale, is spare and elliptical, allowing the film’s atmosphere to do much of the storytelling. The plot spirals around the curse laid by the grief-maddened Baroness Graps (Giovanna Galletti), whose daughter Melissa was trampled to death by villagers and now returns as a vengeful spirit, driving the guilty to madness and self-destruction. Dr. Eswai and Monica, drawn ever deeper into the villa’s secrets, must confront not only the ghost but the buried guilt and superstition that have poisoned the village for generations.
Key moments linger in the mind like fragments of a visionary haze: Monica’s nightmare in which she is menaced by a chilling, innocent-looking doll. When she awakens, she finds the exact same doll has materialized at her bedside; Eswai’s surreal chase through the endless, looping corridors of Villa Graps, culminating in a confrontation with his own doppelgänger; repeatedly entering what appears to be the same space, as the chase escalates, Eswai begins to see himself—literally encountering the doppelgänger, who stares back at him and laughs maniacally before vanishing. This moment is widely recognized as one of the film’s most unsettling and dreamlike set pieces, heightening the sense of supernatural dread and disorientation. Another chilling scene is the haunting death of Nadienne (Micaela Esdra), the innkeeper’s daughter. After being visited at her window by the ghostly Melissa, she is compelled into a trance-like state. Under Melissa’s supernatural influence, she impales herself on a candelabra.
All these moments, combined with the intensity of the villagers’ desperate rituals and the witch Ruth’s futile attempts to shield the innocent from Melissa’s wrath, illustrate how Bava’s mastery lies in his ability to render these set pieces with both baroque beauty and suffocating dread, each scene a tableau of terror and melancholy.
The cast inhabit their roles with conviction and a sense of tragic inevitability. Giacomo Rossi Stuart’s Eswai is both rational and haunted, Erika Blanc’s Monica is luminous and vulnerable, and Fabienne Dali’s Ruth exudes a dark, earthy wisdom. Valerio Valeri’s Melissa, with her fixed stare and spectral grace, is one of horror cinema’s most indelible phantoms.
In the “Toby Dammit” segment of Spirits of the Dead, director Federico Fellini drew direct inspiration from Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby, Kill—specifically, the motif of the ghostly child with a white ball and an unsettling, angelic appearance. “Toby Dammit” features notable visual parallels that are clearly influenced by Bava’s imagery.
Kill, Baby, Kill stands as a haunting meditation on the sins of the past and the inescapable grip of the supernatural. Bava’s use of color and camera is not merely decorative, but essential to the film’s spell—each frame is a painting, each shadow a whisper from the other side. The result is a film that feels less like a story told than a nightmare remembered, echoing through the corridors of Gothic cinema and inspiring generations of filmmakers to come.
LISA AND THE DEVIL 1973
Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil (1973) is a haunting labyrinth of memory, identity, and the supernatural—a film where every corridor seems to spiral into another dream, and every mannequin’s glassy gaze hints at secrets too terrible to name.
Bava, both director and co-writer, orchestrates this puzzle of delirium with the meticulous eye of a master painter, saturating each frame with lush, decaying color and sinister ambiance that feels baroque, ancient, and uncanny. The cinematography by Cecilio Paniagua is sumptuous and surreal: emerald greens and candlelit golds flicker across the villa’s crumbling walls, while shadows pool in corners like spilled ink, threatening to swallow the unwary.
Elke Sommer’s Lisa is a figure of innocence and confusion, a tourist adrift in Toledo who stumbles into a world ruled by Telly Savalas’s Leandro—a devilish butler whose lollipop-twirling nonchalance belies the cosmic malice at play. The cast is a gallery of grotesques and tragic figures: Alida Valli as the blind, imperious countess living in seclusion; Alessio Orano as Maximilian, whose longing and violence are two sides of the same coin; Sylva Koscina and Eduardo Fajardo as the doomed Lehars. Each performance is heightened, dreamlike, as if the actors themselves are caught in Bava’s web of fate.
While sightseeing in Toledo, Lisa becomes separated from her tour group and is drawn to a mysterious villa, where she is taken in by a strange aristocratic family and their enigmatic butler, Leandro. As night falls, Lisa finds herself trapped in a labyrinth of murder, doppelgängers, and supernatural events, with the line between the living and the dead growing ever more blurred. Ultimately, she discovers that she is ensnared in a nightmarish cycle orchestrated by Leandro, who may be the Devil himself.
Lisa and the Devil weaves its horror with a sly, sardonic wit, finding moments of darkly comic absurdity even amid the macabre. Bava’s world is one where death is both grotesque and faintly ridiculous, and the Devil himself presides with a lollipop and a wink, turning terror into a wry game of manners and mortality.
With a devilish shrug and the casual air of a man rearranging deck chairs, Savalas’s Leandro sizes up the stubborn corpse and its uncooperative feet. When the dearly departed proves a tad too tall for the box, Leandro simply snaps the feet with a crisp efficiency, turning a macabre puzzle into a grotesque bit of slapstick, as if he were packing away last season’s mannequins rather than the newly deceased. In his hands, even the indignities of death are met with a wry, lollipop-twirling nonchalance.
The film’s key motif—the mannequin, or dummy—serves as a chilling metaphor for the characters’ loss of agency and identity. Bava fills the villa with these lifeless doubles, blurring the line between the living and the dead, the real and the artificial. In one of the film’s most memorable sequences, Lisa discovers a room crowded with dummies, their faces frozen in rictus grins, echoing the fate that awaits her. The narrative itself coils and doubles back, as Lisa is mistaken for Elena, a long-dead lover, and the boundaries between past and present, reality and nightmare, dissolve entirely.
While Lisa and the Devil does not feature the bouncing white ball motif of Kill, Baby, Kill, it shares that film’s fascination with the uncanny childlike and the power of repetition—here, it is the mannequins and the music box, their mechanical movements echoing the characters’ doomed cycles. With contributions from Bava, Alfredo Leone, and others, the screenplay is elliptical and fragmentary, inviting us to lose ourselves in the film’s shifting logic.
Bava’s direction is both playful and cruel, guiding Lisa—and the audience—through a series of surreal tableaux: a dinner party with the dead, a flight on a plane piloted by the Devil himself, a final transformation as Lisa becomes a mannequin, her humanity stripped away. The film’s ending is a masterstroke of existential horror, suggesting that Lisa’s ordeal is both a punishment and a release, a descent into the self where all masks are finally removed.
Lisa and the Devil stands as one of Bava’s most personal and enigmatic works, a film that seduces with beauty even as it chills with its vision of damnation. It is a surreal fugue rendered in velvet and shadow, a dance of the living and the dead orchestrated by a director at the height of his powers.