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Connections, in both directions
Last Night in Soho (2021)
Directed by Edgar Wright
influenced by Blood and Black Lace (1964), Black Sabbath (1963)
Themes Visuals Plot Music
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The protracted revival of Dario Argento’s Suspiria should be celebrated, and it’s an obvious touchpoint here, along with Deep Red and Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace .
Wright’s visual acuity is too good not to enjoy visual references to Mario Bava’s colorful murder set pieces in Blood and Black Lace or Roman Polanski’s claustrophobia in paranoid thriller Repulsion .
Last Night in Soho isn’t a pastiche of any one cinematic style, but in addition to the debt it owes to giallo classics like Suspiria or Blood and Black Lace , it couldn’t exist without Martin Scorsese’s After Hours , another psychological comedy-thriller in which an innocent outsider gets caught up in the secret nocturnal life of a great world city.
While Soho remains a feast for the senses until the very end, framing ongoing sexual violence in such an exploitative fashion risks superficiality, even when he’s consciously evoking giallo, particularly Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace.
Steven Price’s score begins with what’s known as the most dissonant melodic interval in music, the tritone (see the track “Black Sabbath,” by, well, Black Sabbath), and jives nicely with the stacks of needle drops.
The Babadook (2014)
Directed by Jennifer Kent
influenced by Black Sabbath (1963), Black Sunday (1960)
Visuals
There are many other echoes of screen horror here: clips of Maria Bava’s Black Sabbath; portents of domestic madness in the mode of Polanski’s Repulsion; a general sense of claustrophobia that’s more than a little reminiscent of The Exorcist; a use of grey paint and an overall color-leeched palette to rival The Sixth Sense; and as female-centric psychological horror, it also recalls the evocation of shadow-steeped nocturnal anxiety so chillingly staged in Robert Wise’s The Haunting (63).
A key influence is the terrifying “The Drop of Water” segment of Mario Bava’s 1963 masterpiece “Black Sabbath,” a movie seen on Amelia’s television.
Horror’s long history is also evoked via the glowing television set, which always seems to be playing something weird or uncanny, whether it be old silent shorts by Georges Méliès or Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960).
Shutter Island (2010)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced by Black Sabbath (1963), Black Sunday (1960)
Visuals
In the last couple of years, Scorsese has paid public tribute to famed 1940 low-budget horror producer Val Lewton (the man behind such classics as “The Cat People” and “The Leopard Man”) by producing a documentary examining his life and work and to Italian cult director Mario Bava (“Black Sunday,” “Black Sabbath,” “Twitch of the Death Nerve”) by penning an introduction to author Tim Lucas’ mammoth biography on the man and with this film, he has found the ideal vehicle to celebrate their work in purely cinematic terms.
In the last couple of years, Scorsese has paid public tribute to famed 1940 low-budget horror producer Val Lewton (the man behind such classics as “The Cat People” and “The Leopard Man”) by producing a documentary examining his life and work and to Italian cult director Mario Bava (“Black Sunday,” “Black Sabbath,” “Twitch of the Death Nerve”) by penning an introduction to author Tim Lucas’ mammoth biography on the man and with this film, he has found the ideal vehicle to celebrate their work in purely cinematic terms.
Bava chose to adapt the short story Vij by one of his favorite Russian authors, Nikolai Gogol, into an homage to the early Universal horror films (Dracula [1931], Frankenstein [1931] and Bride of Frankenstein [1935]) he had long admired.
It’s very hard today to imagine people fainting at the 1931 Dracula, yet it supposedly happened.
Indeed, the mystery of the film and the mystery of the tape provide a double-barreled denouement in one of the most intensely disturbing scenes of recent memory, echoing such notable moments in horror history as David Cronenberg's Videodrome, the "Pigeons from Hell" episode of Thriller and the "Drop of Water" segment of Mario Bava's Black Sabbath, while offering something fresh at the same time.
The astronauts stagger through the storm — fuzzed out by swirling soil — in an image that evokes Mario Bava’s ominously beautiful Planet of the Vampires (a source of inspiration for Alien), and when the storm passes, the 3-D brings out every ripple of Mars’s mountainous terrain.
Hellraiser seems inspired more by the Italian horror masters Dario Argento ( Suspiria ), Mario Bava ( Black Sunday ), and Lucio Fulci ( The Beyond ) than by any American horror films.
Bava chose to adapt the short story Vij by one of his favorite Russian authors, Nikolai Gogol, into an homage to the early Universal horror films (Dracula [1931], Frankenstein [1931] and Bride of Frankenstein [1935]) he had long admired.
The Neon Demon (2016)
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
influenced by Blood and Black Lace (1964)
Visuals
He's also working within a tradition begun by the giallo directors of the 1970s, especially Mario Bava, whose fashion-themed horror Blood and Black Lace even shares a hypercolor palette with The Neon Demon.
It's the poisoned glass from Notorious (almost better, because a purse is the more traditionally vulgar cinematic analog to a vagina 3 )--and, like the best of Argento's early "supernatural" pictures, Bava's film reinterprets Hitchcock's themes and obsessions with an angry, urgent, just-this-side-of-alien ugliness.
The great Martin Scorsese has described the appeal of Bava (whose films include classics such as " Black Sunday " and " Kill, Baby, Kill ") thusly: "Hardly any story, just atmosphere, with all that fog and ladies walking down corridors; a kind of Italian gothic."
Let the Right One In (2008)
Directed by Tomas Alfredson
influenced by Black Sunday (1960)
Characters
Though the character of Eli has a film history as far back as Lambert Hillyer’s 1936 classic Dracula’s Daughter and Mario Bava’s Black Sunday , Alfredson’s film is less interested in femininity than it is in childhood perceptions of gender.
The post-modernity extends off-screen: Dario Argento produced, and the director is the son of Mario (Black Sabbath) Bava.
Bava's presence here may explain why the film's subdued lighting brings to mind Bava's The Whip and the Body .
The stories are rather facile, their ironies unilluminating; contrary to the suggestion of its Oscar validation and overall success (the movie swept Argentina’s equivalent of the Academy Awards, and is the biggest homegrown box-office hit in that country’s history), the film is not an advance, in themes or style, over such predecessors as the omnibus horror thrillers of the 1960s and ’70s (“Black Sabbath,” “Tales from the Crypt”).
Likewise, there are elements from sleazier iterations, like Mario Bava's model murder movie Blood and Black Lace (1964).
Spindell puts him front-and-center in an ambitious and impressively stylish horror anthology that also owes a lot to Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath, with Brown acting as the film’s Boris Karloff, serving in the role of storyteller.
And when it comes to truly gruesome murder scenes, Malignant could give Mario Bava’s A Bay Of Blood a run for its money.
Even earlier, Mario Bava did it with Planet of the Vampires and he did it with a lot less money.
Horror legend Barbara Steele ( Black Sunday , Pit and the Pendulum ) appears in a smallish role and future cult star Lynn Lowry plays a nurse (and appears nude).
The atmospheric, black and white film stirred up controversy due to some disturbingly violent content (for the time) and made an international star of lead actress Barbara Steele (8½ [1963], Castle of Blood [1964], Caged Heat [1974], Shivers/They Came from Within [1975]).