Blood and Black Lace

Mario Bava's film, counted among the founding works of the giallo. Models are killed one by one in a fashion house. The killer's face is covered by a white, flat, featureless mask; he wears gloves, a hat and a coat. His identity is unknown, and the film is less interested in solving the murders than in the murders themselves. All the genre's templates are here together: the gloved killer, the world of fashion and money, the concealed culprit, the long and designed sequences of the killings. Bava's real contribution is the image. The scenes are painted with coloured light: red, green and violet used together in one room, so the space stops being realistic and becomes a constructed field. That method directly shaped the visual language of later giallo and of 1980s horror. The deaths are explicit and long; for its period, unusually hard. Cameron Mitchell and Eva Bartok are in the cast. One of the foundational works for anyone curious about the giallo, the history of horror and the use of colour. For a viewer expecting depth of character or a coherent mystery, the film has no interest in either; what comes forward is design.