Blood and Black Lace

Hitchcock's Psycho and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, both made in 1960, marked a new sub-genre of the horror film that distanced itself from the period settings of the Gothic horror films made by Terence Fisher (Hammer) or Roger Corman (AIP). The new variation, later labelled 'slasher films', received its first major flowering in Italy in the form of the giallo films (named after the yellow cover of the hard-boiled thriller-pulps published in Italy from the thirties onwards). It drew on the thriller genre to bring viewers face to face with the unspeakable but indispensable dimensions of their desire for cinema, while renegotiating in disturbing ways the kind of gender and sexuality issues which received an altogether more adolescent and therefore more culturally acceptable treatment in films such as Dr No (1962). The new genre revolved around the 'body-in-pieces' fantasy as opposed to the more straightforward class-based Oedipal fantasies underpinning the crime thrillers or the equally Oedipal conflicts between religion and the Enlightenment which form the matrix of the Dracula and Frankenstein stories. Whereas the Oedipal horror and thriller films dramatised the emergence of subjectivity into a symbolically ordered world with fixed, though illusory, notions of gendered identities, the body-in-pieces fantasies emphasise the perverse (by our cultural and moral standards), violent and dispersed world of infancy with its murderous narcissism, megalomania and dictatorial insistence on instant gratification. It is this excessively intense, libido-driven world which, in the forms and stories of gialli, encounters the equally violent imposition of a cultural 'Order'. Instead of coherent narratives and balanced, 'classic' stylistic features, the body-in-pieces films are characterised by formal excess (delirious colours, emphatic and frankly emotively manipulative music fragments, a relentlessly mobile camera which refuses to adhere to 'logical' delineations of space, etc.) and narratives that operate with a fantasy logic far removed from the requirements of realism's so-called rational narrative economy.In Italy, it was Mario Bava who initiated and crystallised the giallo genre with La ragazza che sapeva troppo (1962) and, most particularly, with Sei Donne per l'Assassino. Later, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci elaborated the genre further until it migrated to the US and achieved success with the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series. Bava's films are as plotless as it is possible for mainstream commercial cinema to be, using the strict minimum of narrative elements, to motivate the mise en scene of lusciously flamboyant sado-voyeuristic operas. In this film, the audience is no longer asked to care about who gets killed - the title announces and summarises the action - and the killer, in a faceless mask, is merely the anonymous, ambiguously gendered representative of the male spectator as 'he' (in quotation marks, because becoming a 'he' is the problem animating the film) stalks a series of women guilty of nothing less than provoking desire. The setting is a school for fashion models trafficking in the exploitation of desire. A man, attempting to gain control of this empire of the senses, obsessively carves away all traces of femininity until 'his' feminine side is totally removed and 'he' achieves pure masculinity, which, of course, is also the moment of his own destruction, since male and female cannot be separated into wholly distinct identities.This Grand Guignol theatre of the unconscious, writing in flaming reds, deathly greens and sickening mauves what most films decently hide behind believable scenarios and well-rounded characters, allows a chilling perversity to seep through into every sequence of a film where women, although their representations do appear on the screen, rigorously do not figure at all. Killer and victims become dream figures moving in a scenario of male phobias turning upon the desperate attempt to eliminate the disturbances generated by desire. The women represent the desiring side of men, a weakness that must be cut away if genuine, controlling masculinity is to be achieved. Bava's film is about the nightmare of 'having to become a man' in a patriarchal, woman-hating, Christian society where any trace of femininity in a supposedly masculine identity induces panic fears. However, like all the best films in this genre, Bava's film is also a demonic ceremony visualising the pathological dimensions inherent in all cinematic spectacle, confronting us, the viewers, with a sado-voyeuristic delirium that simultaneously fascinates and repels, playing the repressed depths of our own desire to see things being done to others (as we detour our neuroses through both the aggressors and their victims) back at us without providing the usual excuses designed + +to cloak our desire to see what we should not see. Programme: Sei donne per l'assassino/Blood and Black Lace (Mario Bava, Italy/France/Germany 1964, Colour, 90 min)