Baron Blood is ultimately a heady exercise in style, with several brilliantly mounted sequences; a convincing, insistent air of horror; and some unforgettable imagery. In one of the film’s most evocative scenes, Peter and Eva enlist the help of a local psychic, Christina Hoffman (Rada Rassimov), to get rid of the Baron. Christina is one of a long line of Bava’s beautiful, powerful, but tormented beauties, a kind of Magna Mater whose connections to the world of the supernatural wreak havoc on her. (Think of Barbara Steele in Black Sunday.) Christina’s invocation of a witch who has the power to destroy the Baron inspires one of his most exquisite tableaux, with Christina in the foreground on the left being slowly possessed by the witch, speaking in her voice, while the witch herself is seen in a funeral pyre in the background on the right. (Christina’s demeanor is reminiscent of another of Bava’s most unforgettable images – the masked Sibyl in Hercules in the Haunted World.) The Baron’s arrival later to murder Christina is handled with masterful ellipsis; the scene fades discreetly as Christina, aware of her killer’s arrival, stoically folds her arms over her face in a retreat into her dreamworld.

Bava is always at his best in chase sequences, and this film features one of his best when Eva is pursued through the quaint town by the evil Baron. Not surprisingly, the streets are deserted, but through the director’s sleight-of-hand, they appear to be teeming with nightmarish activity. He drenches them in his trademark mix of colored fogs and spotlights; a favorite shot shows Eva standing against one of these lights, which seems to emanate both from her and from behind her, as if she were now a part, however unwilling, of this creepy demimonde. The Baron’s skulking presence as a relentless pursuer, emerging from the miasma always a few feet from her, adds scintillating terror.

Another of the director’s treasured motifs is a kind of fetishized sadism, and that too is present here. Bava resurrects the spikes-in-the-face image from Black Sunday in the murder of the demented villager Fritz, who’s layed out in an iron coffin, a particularly nasty variation of the Iron Maiden of the Baron’s time. Of course, the director is egalitarian in his horrors: class and social standing don’t prevent the vicious dispatch of a kindly doctor via one of the Baron’s everpresent metal hooks.

Baron Blood on DVD offers a welcome chance to reassess the film. The redoubtable Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog contributes an insightful essay, and extras include filmographies of the major stars, a Bava biography and filmography, a poster and stills gallery, and an appropriately sleazy trailer that brings it all back for those of us who saw it in its natural setting, as horrific in its own way as Bava’s scary dreamscapes: the grindhouse.