- Arrow Video’s Bay of Blood Alternate flipside sleeve art
Certain horror genres have been around so long, they are part of the fabric of filmmaking and the stylistic rules are so familar that they become short hand, allowing the plot to move forward without explanation to the clued in audience.
Have you noticed that in modern vampire movies and TV shows, they spend a lot of time these days discussing what weapons don’t work on vampires because that’s just something “out of the movies”? The audience are so comfortable with the rule of engagement that filmmakers can now trade in massive doses of post-modern irony.
The Slasher genre is another seemingly ageless style of horror film. Each year, we see another brace of them. Each year the same point of view camera work, shower scenes and fetish kills.
Stalk n slash took hold in the late 70s and flooded the early 80s market but there are certain films that pointed the way. Bob Clark’s Black Christmas may not have had the visceral bloodletting of later offerings, but it featured the kind of leering, peeping tom camera work thatbecome a feature of the genre and the required group of harassed young women.
For a real clue as to the influences on the slasher movie, look no further than Bay of Blood. The similarities between certain scenes in Mario Bava’s Italian horror classic and the second in the all conquering Friday the 13th franchise are remarkable.
There are other arguments that they weren’t lifted wholesale from the earlier movie but watch the Machete to the face scene in both films or the moment when two characters are speared together during the act of lovemaking and it seems more than a coincidence. I’m not saying that these moments are a rip off, more a loving tribute perhaps, to a filmmaker whose mark on fantastic cinema can’t be over estimated.
Mario Bava was producing violent and devastatingly stylish thrillers at the dawn of the Italian Giallo boom and the its formula of bloody violence, mystery and red herrings also feeds into the Slasher style. So can we hold up a Bava as one of the grandfathers of Stalk ‘n’ Slash? I’m not sure he’d have been too happy with that title as he was a rarity, a real artist in world of journeymen.
Mario Bava’s influential Slasher prototype BAY OF BLOOD comes to UK DVD and Blu-Ray this week. This is a film that came several years before the huge wave of masked kills and murdered co-eds that flooded cinemas in the late 70s, but most reviews agree that the film still stands up and it’s an essential part of any horror fans collection. 