New Prints!
Just like his films in which the past is never quite dead and buried, Italian director Mario Bava is back, risen from the grave. The reason is a ripening appreciation for his body of work, an appreciation that never crept into the light during his lifetime. Master of the malign, Bava rendered highly atmospheric, often baroque tales that meld gothic horror, the supernatural, pop fantasy, and his self-styled giallo, thrillers that linger on violent death and an emboldened sexuality. He began his career as a cinematographer, and his films are almost hallucinatory for their lushly imagined settings in which curls of fog take on menacing proportion and interior space entraps and confuses like a catacomb. Preoccupied by key themes, Bava dwells on the unreliability of appearance, the destructive potential of human nature, and the continual return of prior wrongdoing. In his haunted and harried world, reason falters, violence reigns, and the past proves unforgiving. Decades after their making, Bava's films, such as the boldly expressionistic Black Sunday (1960), the strangely ominous Kill, Baby...Kill! (1966), and the garishly gruesome Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971), can still coax the gasp, the shudder, and the "Oh my god!"
-Steve Seid
