Bava is credited with directing the first giallo film, The Girl Who Knew Too Much; his final black-and-white film which again showed his mastery of using shades and tones of a scene to influence the mood of a film. These talents would be taken to a new extreme with his second color film and second in the giallo genre, Blood and Black Lace. Every scene is a mobile, Technicolor painting, accenting the carnage or depressing the calm, and though this film as considered even more influential to future giallos than The Girl Who Knew Too Much, it was with The Whip and the Body that most critics claim as his masterpiece.
The Whip and the Body brought Mario Bava back to horror, but this was a unique type of horror film. This was a romantic tale for the macabre; a love story for sadists. The story brings Kurt Menliff (Christopher Lee; The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Dracula has Risen from the Grave) back to his family’s castle, wanting to congratulate his brother, Christian Menliff (Tony Kendall; Machine Gun McCain, Corleone) on his new found financial success, but no one believes Kurt for an instant. They all feel that he is there only to torment the family; especially his brother’s wife, who happens to be Kurt’s ex-lover, Nevenka (Dalia Lavi; The Demon, Some Girls Do). When Kurt abandoned the family before, Nevenka went into a depression that the household thought she would never recover from, but with Christian’s aid, she did, so they all feared that Kurt would attempt to claim her once again.
Unsurprisingly, Kurt and Nevenka do reprise their intimate relationship, because only Kurt knows Nevenka’s secret temptation. Nevenka is a sadist and is quickly aroused when she is abused, particularly with a whip; she even dreams at night about it and wakes up smiling. Once Kurt engages her in this romantically vicious game, Nevenka falls for him once more, but one day soon after, Kurt is murdered. While some of the household is concerned, and all are suspects for the murder, most of them seem thankful – until – Nevenka begins seeing Kurt’s ghost roaming around the castle, seeking vengeance on anyone that may have had a hand in his murder and still pursuing his gratuitous affair with her.
The cast does a fine job as everyone’s role seems to fit their best thespian features; Christopher Lee, playing the mischievously vile tormentor, and Daliah Lavi as a strong-willed, but overly passionate countess. The pacing is slow, but to grasp the haunted atmosphere aided by the tortured tenants, it works. The true star here, however, is Mario Bava’s directing. His cinematography is the finest orchestrated use of color that I personally could rival only to John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967). There is not a single wasted scene in either movie. Each frame of film is a carefully crafted neon-lit composition that would make for a fine tattoo to be poked on to someone’s drunken butt at a horror film festival, or a questionable treasure to be hung inside the snootiest of art museums.
The Whip and the Body is a fine film with excellent directing. The director will probably be forever known more than most of the movies he ever worked on, and that alone is a tribute to the heart and mind that Mario Bava gave to a genre that most movie-goers and film lovers would pass off as uniquely adorable or even silly, but Mario Bava treated it as serioiusly as Orson Welles would treat any of his mainstream, multiply paised films; and the fans of horror and of Mario Bava, past, present, and future, would and will appreciate his work one-hundred times more.
Bava influenced the master of giallo, Dario Argento and horror maestro John Carpenter, and even haunted positively the likes of Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott. His film Kill, Baby, Kill….influenced the popular Japanese film genre, J-Horror. So, to say that Mario Bava had a hand in shaping the horror of today would be an understatement because he helped shape all movies of today.
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