Kill, Baby... Kill!

More lush, gothic horror from Mario Bava. A strange amalgamation of period horror, and a giallo-style detective story. When a young woman dies under mysterious circumstances in a rural village, Dr. Eswai is sent to perform an autopsy, and discovers a gold coin buried in the cadaver's heart. But when the lead investigator also dies, things really take a turn for the bizarre. As usual with Bava, this is nothing short of a visual masterpiece. His use of color suggests what a Douglas Sirk horror film would look like, and he has a very meticulous way of framing his shots and arranging sequences. Whenever the face of the ghost appears in the window it is genuinely downright scary, his camera lingers on the face long enough to make an impact, and sear the image on your mind, but not long enough for it to lose its potency. Along with Planet of the Vampires, Kill, Baby, Kill! also shows an increasing use of surrealist techniques in his work that I only imagine become wilder the more one progresses through his filmography. Bava is still one of the masters of the macabre.