The unusual and disquieting visuals of Bava's films seem rooted in a conception of life as an uncomfortable union of illusion and reality. The dramatic conflict for his characters lies in confronting the dilemma of distinguishing between the two perceptions. In the black-and-white Black Sunday, Bava captured the apprehension of a figure moving down a corridor by a device as simple as a shifting sidelight. As this light strikes first one half of the face and then the other, it is easy to equate with the mixture of fear and curiosity that drives the character forward. In his later color films, Bava frequently compounded this equation by changing the light from blue to red with their respective connotations of cold and warmth.

While the plot lines of Bava’s movies often contain the presence of an extraordinary being or object in an otherwise natural environment, that is seldom the narrative focus. Instead Bava led his central figures out of their normal lives into a world of lurking phantoms or psychopaths. With allusions that ranged from Dante to Hitchcock--the Italian title of the suspense-comedy, The Evil Eye is La Ragazza che sapeva troppo or The Girl Who Knew Too Much--Bava situated his protagonists in a mutable world, composed of opposing spheres of influence, of shifting colors and times, of complements and atonalities. This world moves, like Spenser’s ever-whirling wheel from reality to illusion and back again, from life to death and death to life through a landscape littered with phantasmagorical sights and sounds. On both symbolic and sensory levels, Bava’s dramatic personae are thrust into the unstable middle ground between these two existential extremities, where figures glide through misty, opulently decorated but ultimately illusory and insubstantial settings. This spectral passageway linking the natural and supernatural worlds was, for Bava, a world of semi-darkness in which shadows and hallucinations can be real and, more importantly, in which the path forward or back, the way out, is unmarked.

The oracle Medea in Hercules in the Haunted World (Ercole al Centro della Terra, 1961) typifies one stranded in this limbo. The masked form of the woman is combined with an eerie, labored voice, modulated as if she were calling from a chamber deep below ground. She is separated from the camera, or real world, plane of view by a curtain of glimmering beads. While she sits swaying between two worlds, a series of green, blue, and gold lights successively cut through the frame, alternately striking her body and falling behind her to throw her into silhouette.