Kill, Baby... Kill! (

1966

) ½

I'll confess a certain weakness for films made in the transitory years of the 1960s. Only in these years would it be possible for a horror film to naively combine plots and characters that would not have been out of place in a Universal horror film from the 1930s with visuals, effects, and mature content that seems positively revolutionary by way of comparison. While most films from this era feel incredibly quaint, even more so than their more distant cousins from the 1930-1950s, and can't even hope to inspire anything approaching dread in a modern audience, they are nonetheless remarkably interesting. There is something uniquely charming about watching a sex and gore-laden technicolor film about a mad cultist who worships an Egyptian god, as evidenced by Blood Feast (1963). However, this joy is far sweeter when it's anchored to a film with actual artistic merit, as Blood Feast (1963), for all its numerous charms, is still the clumsy first horror outing of a director/writer/composer whose only previous film-making experience was soft-core pornography. For those looking for a more presentable horror film to showcase the time between the stodgy Gothics of yesteryear and the scummy slashers of the 70s and 80s, it's hard to do better than Mario Bava's Kill, Baby... Kill! (which bears the bizarre, rejected James Bond movie title of Operation Fear in its native Italy... Seriously who came up with that stinker?).

Bava, fresh from pioneering the Giallo sub-genre with The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) and Blood and Black Lace (1965), returned to the Gothics. His earlier work, like Black Sunday (1960) could hardly be described as strictly traditional, but at the very least it looked like a Gothic horror film from the 30s or 40s. Kill, Baby... Kill! on the other hand, despite its familiar plot, is immediately visually distinct from its predecessor. Not only is there a scandalous amount of sex and violence onscreen (for 1966 anyway), but the familiar locations are bathed in unnatural and striking colors that give the whole proceedings a twinge of the surreal. At times they are bright and obvious, with primary colors clashing right next to each other. In other instances, they are so subtle, and so artfully done that only a single cobweb is bathed with a faint greenish tinge. Of course, one must hesitate to give Bava too much credit (the man was humble to a fault by all accounts, and we'd probably only embarrass him by heaping too much praise on his head); he was not the first filmmaker to think to of creating a classic Gothic under garish neon lights with copious sex and violence. The influence of Roger Corman's Edgar Allen Poe cycle, House of Usher (1960) in particular, as well as the Hammer horror films like Curse of Frankenstein (1957) are present. However, there is a certain Bava-touch on display here, a visual flair that sets his films apart from the rest of their inspirations and imitators.

This Bava-touch will be self-evident right from the opening scenes of Kill, Baby... Kill!, as we see a young woman drawn, seemingly against her will, to a precipice. Here the camera lunges suddenly down into the abyss, zooming in until an iron fence comes into sharp relief. The camera lingers there for a moment, pausing on the metal spikes gleaming in the darkness. Then, with little warning, the poor girl hurls herself from the ledge and impales herself on the fence. This pattern will become familiar as the film progresses, as Bava's camera is almost constantly in motion, always tracking around to keep its mobile character in the frame, panning to some hitherto unseen detail, or zooming in on what at first looks like a minor background detail. The visual style of the film is extreme, at times becomes rather goofy (though for my money the only times it veers into parodic levels of indulgence is the sequence where a rapid zoom-in and zoom-out is used to imitate the POV of a child on a swing-set), but it is never confusing. Indeed, with only a few rare exceptions (the aforementioned swing scene among them), every cinematic flourish seems to be in service of facilitating the audience's understanding of the action onscreen. Bava's cinematography always has a purpose greater than merely his desire to show off.

The story will be instantly familiar to anyone who has seen a Gothic horror film before: There has been a mysterious death in the remote village of Karmington (the poor girl who threw herself onto the iron fence). Normally, the case would be ruled a suicide with minimal investigation, but in this case, the young woman wrote a letter before dying saying she was afraid she would be killed. This is not much of a lead, but it is sufficient to galvanize the proper authorities to send in a team of outsiders to investigate. We have Inspector Krueger, the cop in charge of the investigation, Dr. Paul Eswai who has been called in to serve as coroner and examine the body, and Irena Hollander, a medical student selected to aid Dr. Eswai who was originally from the village but has been away since she was an infant.

One would expect locals living in a remote mountain village to be somewhat hostile to the state's emissaries, especially considering these are probably the first outsiders to visit the village in ages. However, the people in the town are not just cagey, they are downright terrified. Not only does nobody know anything about the murder, but virtually every person Krueger questions has claims that they have never even met the girl, an impossibility in a town as small as Karmington. The only information he can get out of the locals is the girl's name and the fact that she was employed by Baroness Graps. The townsfolk are also worried to the point of hysteria by just letting the girl's dead body lay unburied for a few days while the investigation is carried out, and they are apoplectic at the idea of letting Dr. Eswai perform an autopsy. Hell, the doctor hasn't been in the village for five minutes before he catches a group of townsfolk trying to rush a burial.

However, just because the plot is familiar does not mean that the film does not handle this well-worn story with a degree of skill. The film is very careful not to give away too much of the mystery at the start, but it also does a skillful job of ensuring the audience that there is something to give away. Case in point, in one scene burgomeister Karl tells Inspector Krueger that the town and the baroness' manor has a dreadful secret, one that he will reveal to the inspector even though uttering it aloud may put his own life in jeopardy. However, the scene ends right before the audience actually gets to hear what the horrible secret is. Better yet, we will never see the inspector alive again and burgomeister Karl will be MIA for much of the rest of the runtime as well. Up to this point, all we had were some unhelpful, superstitious locals refusing to cooperate with outside authorities, behavior that could be explained by any number of social factors or supernatural curses. However, after this scene, we know for sure that the villagers are not only hiding something but that they have good reason to be afraid and withhold information from the outside interlopers. We know that Villa Grapes and the baroness are somehow involved and that even seemingly respectable figures, like the burgomeister, regard this matter with dread and apprehension. Moreover, the disappearance of Inspector Krueger from the story (and as we later learn his death) makes it clear that this is no mere local superstition we're dealing with. Something real and dangerous is prowling the town, something the audience will be desperate to learn more about.

Horror filmmakers in continental Europe are playing on easy mode when it comes to production values, especially in the middle decades of the last century. While an amateur filmmaker in North America will have to scour his nearby area for something as creepy and visually striking as an abandoned warehouse or an isolated cabin, his counterparts in Italy, Spain, and France have to merely pack a lunch and hike out to whatever ancient or medieval ruin is within day-trip distance. Hell, even filmmakers operating on a budget as tiny as the ones Jean Rollin usually enjoyed, can easily get access to unique and visually inspiring places to shoot his films, just look at The Iron Rose (1973). Naturally, Bava, who was no amateur on the fringes of cinema but rather a second-generation filmmaker with nearly three decades of experience in the industry, could manage a bit more.

The bulk of Kill, Baby... Kill was filmed in Calcata, a medieval settlement that's a short drive from Rome. The town had been largely abandoned since the 1930s when the government, fearing the structures built into the mountain's cliffs might collapse, condemned the entire city and moved all the inhabitants to New Calcata. The result is an entire historic town that by 1966 had been left to silently molder for three decades. Dress that up with some fake spider webs and neon lighting and you have one of the most memorable horror movie locations of all time. Sure, the ruined town doesn't really look convincingly Carpathian, indeed it's such a classic Italian town that I doubt the word “burgomeister” had been uttered aloud there before production began on the film. Likewise, the few scene shots outside of the ruins of Calcata, most notably the exterior shots of Villa Grapes, don't fit together with the rest of the film, being both an obviously newer structure as well as one which has undergone regular maintenance. These of course are mere nitpicks, as when taken on the whole the set-dressing and location scouting in Kill, Baby... Kill is phenomenal.