Elke Sommer (left) runs from the Baron in Baron Blood.

In Baron Blood, Bava also added another layer of contrast between the modern characters and objects and the architecture, antiques, and icons of the past. The "haunted" castle of Baron Blood is a maze of stone and iron. Through Gothic arches and down spiral staircases into dungeons decked with iron maidens and racks, characters descend from a modern world into the chambers of the past where ancient horrors still lurk. Bava reinforced the disequilibrium with his usual off-angled shots, spinning pans, and cross-zooms, sometimes dizzyingly repeated as many as four times, and straight cuts from tight long lens close-ups to distorted wide angles of the old castle’s expanses. Sustained sequences such as the reanimated Baron’s pursuit of Eva through the fog-enshrouded passageways and courtyards at night is vintage Bava, but so are subtler visualizations. When the child Gretchen flees from an unseen presence in the woods, the camera assumes the pursuer’s point of view. Then at a pivotal moment, a low angle captures Gretchen clambering up a gully and over a ridge just before the Baron’s black cape cuts across the foreground and blots out the frame. Decor, costuming, and optical effects work with camera movement in the seance scene to invoke Elizabeth Holly. A tight shot on an amulet in the medium’s hand slowly focuses. Then a zoom and dolly shot are combined to pull back to a wide angle, revealing the other characters around a pyre by the monolith where Holly was burned as a witch by the Baron. Finally, her spirit appears, superimposed over the flames at frame right and speaking through the medium at frame left.

  The heroine of Evil Eye faints on the streets of Rome.

Ironically, Bava could portray those characters whose distrust of every shadow and stray sound helps them survive as semi-comic and slightly paranoid. The heroine of The Evil Eye becomes such a figure in self defense. After witnessing the death of a stabbing victim, she faints and comes to her senses in a hospital where she has been admitted for chronic alcoholism. Her story is dismissed as a case of delirium tremens. This sets in motion a central series of scenes in which the significant details are designed to be misread. In a visit to a rural locale and an antique Roman site, ominous low angles and traveling shots follow her while she tries to evade a suspicious-looking man. He catches up and reveals that he merely wants to pick her up. In a later sequence, she constructs a maze of thread and talcum powder in a living room to trip up the knife-wielding killer she believes is stalking her. She succeeds in almost breaking the neck of a smitten young doctor trying to cure her delusions. In a final scene, after the killer has been caught, she and the doctor are riding a funicular railway and witness a jealous husband shoot his wife and her lover. He is aghast; but, because she has promised him to forget all about murders, she refuses to admit seeing anything. It is simultaneously one of the most humorous and one of the darkest endings in Bava’s work.

Seriously or satirically, all of Bava’s films question the permanence of commonplace reality. Given this recurrent theme, there are no restrictions on figurative potential of his visual usage. The catalogue of Bava’s style is as broad and eclectic as the genres in which he worked. He may use a long take to build dramatic tension, as in the fashion show which is prelude to the first murder in Blood and Black Lace. He may use a low angle on a figure to suggest dominance, as in the initial encounter between Rurik and the villainous Augen in Knives of the Avenger. He may use montage for a "traditional" symbolic rendering, as in the third episode ("The Wurdalak") of Black Sabbath, cutting from a vampire embracing her lover, to her undead family, to the victim’s frenzied horse, whinnying, rearing up, and breaking his tether to flee. An isolated detail which is used for suspense in one film, such as the killer peering through a curtain in Baron Blood, may be transmuted for comic effect in another, as in the eyes of a portrait that seem to leer at the heroine of The Evil Eye as she undresses. The make-up and special effects that give a photographic reality to the revivification of the vampire in Black Sunday are reapplied sardonically in Danger: Diabolik (1967), where exaggerated costuming and matte shots make the characters stand out in relief, like comic-book figures. Even the most bizarre images may be used to evoke a frisson, as when the dead astronauts stand up in their shallow graves and tear out of their plastic shrouds in Planet of the Vampires, or laughter, as in the close-up shot of the supposedly dead Diabolik encased in translucent gold and winking at his female accomplice.

Left: The dead astronauts rise from their graves in Planet of Vampires. Right: Superspy Diabolik becomes covered with gold in Danger: Diabolik.

Alain Silver is an independent film producer and sometime critic, who has previously written about Kiss Me Deadly for Images. His books with James Ursini, who is a lecturer and educator, include The Vampire Film, More Things Than are Dreamt Of, David Lean and his Films, and the forthcoming The Noir Style and Roger Corman: Metaphysics on a Shoestring. Together they edited Film Noir Reader and the most recent edition of Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference.