Blood and Black Lace (1964)
Directed by Mario Bava
Isabella, a young model, is murdered by a mysterious masked figure at a fashion house in Rome. When her diary, which details the house employees' many vices, disappears, the masked killer begins killing off all the models in and around the house to find it.
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What critics compared Blood and Black Lace to
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.
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.
Likewise, there are elements from sleazier iterations, like Mario Bava's model murder movie Blood and Black Lace (1964).
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Though the genre's invention (named after the yellow/giallo covers of Italian penny dreadfuls) is credited to compatriot Mario Bava (see, especially, his astonishing Blood and Black Lace), Argento's scary polish and cunning for film language bridged the cultural, mainstream/arthouse gap with agility and audacity.
To continue the metaphor, Bava's 1964 Blood and Black Lace (a colorful mistranslation of Sei donne per l'assassino, or Six Women for the Killer) is the Halloween of gialli: the film that really nailed down almost all of the "rules" for the style, with the understanding that "giallo" is a much less specific category than "slasher", based on mood, style and narrative ingredients rather than a easily-identified narrative structure.
The critical longevity of perplexing Euro-horror masterworks like Blood and Black Lace (1964), A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971), and Suspiria (1977) certainly suggest the latter.
It all sounds ridiculous, but Strickland knows how to use his camera: The imagery is somehow both sensuous and gruesome, which is the precise balancing act that the best giallo films — think Dario Argento’s Deep Red, or Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace — also manage to pull off.
"Blood and Black Lace." "The Bird With the Crystal Plumage."
There’s a little bit of the original “Black Christmas”, quite a bit of Mario Bava’s “Blood and Black Lace” (though mostly in terms of style), nothing you haven’t seen before on a story level.
While Bava used a rich palette of reds, greens, and blues in his works like Blood and Black Lace , it was always in the context of how the scene was lit.
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If Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch turns violence into a ballet, then Blood and Black Lace is murder as ballroom dance.