Bava Goes Fashion

This chapter recounts Mario Bava's seventh official solo feature film as a director, a present-day thriller set in the world of high fashion titled The Atelier of Death (L'atelier della morte). It also mentions Bava's two other Gothic horror movies released in Italy in the summer of 1963 that were destined primarily for foreign markets, especially in America. It discusses I tre volti della paura starring Boris Karloff and Mark Damon, and La frusta e il corpo with Christopher Lee and Daliah Lavi. The chapter describes Bava's debut film La maschera del demonio in 1960, which distributed overseas by American International Pictures under the title Black Sunday. It points out how the Italian film industry had increasingly been involved in bilateral and multinational co-productions since the first agreement signed with France in 1949.

The Red Telephone

This chapter discusses the film Blood and Black Lace (6 donne per l'assassino) that has become a cult movie over the years. It mentions how many young cinephiles became aware of the film in the 1980s via the opening sequence of the Matador film in 1986 by Pedro Almodóvar. It also talks about the fruition of a genre film through the filter of a thought-provoking auteur such as Almodóvar, who summed up the most obvious elements of an erotic mise-en scène of death with a paradoxical commentary through the protagonist's sexual arousal. The chapter describes the influence of Blood and Black Lace on foreign cinema, such as the film “Halloween” in 1978 by John Carpenter that reinvents Mario Bava's expressionless, ubiquitous, and mute assassin into a new icon. It also cites the 1984 film A Nightmare on Elm Street that features a murderer wearing a lethal razorblade glove which recalls the spiked weapon seen in Bava's film.

Something To Do With Women, Something To Do With Death

This chapter highlights diverse influences that resulted in the film Blood and Black Lace (6 donne per l'assassino). It explains how Mario Bava and his co-scriptwriters expunged all traces of humour from the story, eliminating the annoying comic interludes that plagued the film La ragazza che sapeva troppo. It also investigates how the makers of Blood and Black Lace drew from other sources and enhanced the Gothic mood that characterised the Edgar Wallace Krimis cycle. The chapter describes the ways in which violence in films is directed towards the female body, such as the opening sequence of the film La maschera del demonio where the character Asa is tortured with the titular spiked mask and burned at the stake. It discusses how horror underlined a radical change in the erotic imagery of the average Italian.

A Matter of Style

This chapter discusses how Mario Bava opted color for his film Blood and Black Lace (6 donne per l'assassino), which he had also done in his previous horror films. It talks about Bava's employment of Eastmancolor for the saturated colour compositions of his Gothic movies that drove the colour consultants on set to distraction. It also illustrates the context in which the characters moved in Blood and Black that ended up looking like a non-place, both baroque and abstract, that brought together elements typical of the Gothic genre. The chapter describes Blood and Black Lace's labyrinthine atelier of death as a modern-day subsidiary of Gothic's castles, with crypt, secret passages, curtains fluttering in the night, and mannequins instead of suits of armour. It also looks into the insistence of shapes that move with mechanical regularity that represented Blood and Black Lace's microcosm, where the distinction between human and nonhuman becomes uncertain, fleeting, and deceptive.