Mario Bava is a filmmaker I have been meaning to dive into for decades. Aside from a few examples (Black Sunday, Danger Diabolik), I was unable to watch more of his work.
Black Sunday was one of my favourite movies as a teenager.
I read so much about Italian horror before I watched it, and Black Sunday lived up to the hype. It was the movie that what I wanted from Hammer. Even though it was in black and white, Bava’s sense of composition, and understanding of special effects, created a world so atmospheric and visceral, it felt like a nightmare come to life.
His second film is a credited director, Hercules in the Haunted World is a stylistic exercise in low-budget ingenuity, calling on Bava’s talents as a special effects designer to craft the titular environment.
The story is bobbins, the acting stiff, the comedy absolutely dire.
In a perverse act of sacrilege, Christopher Lee’s performance as the duplicitous villain is muffled by having some other performer provide the English dub.
All those things are ephemeral.
To borrow a term the kids use, this movie is all vibes.
The early scenes are familiar sword and sandal stuff - Hercules (Reg Park) and Theseus engage in some hijinks with bandits and pretty damsels, before returning home. Bright, sunny, unpretentious.
Once Hercules gets tasked with descending into the underworld, the movie shifts.
This is the Bava of Black Sunday, only here in full vivid colour.
With sparse production design, the underworld is conveyed by soundstages filled with smoke and coloured lighting.
Bava makes use of the bare settings, using simple tricks like placing objects in the extreme foreground, with some judicious matte paintings and double exposure to build out the world.
While crude, the effects are so precise you are never taken out - instead, they become disconcerting signs of how uncanny this space is.
Our heroes are repeatedly warned not to trust what they see, and these techniques help to maintain the tension when the onscreen action does not.
As a purely cinematic experience, it is marvelous. As a narrative, the film moves in fits and starts - but every time it sags, there is some new set piece that brings you back in.
And the film manages to save some real dread for the final reel. As Lico prepares to sacrifice Hercules's lady love, our hero is waylaid by an army of zombies which proceed to overwhelm the now mortal hero. It is a jolt of visceral gothic horror that gives the final showdown a real sense of stakes - literal apocalyptic forces are in the wings, waiting for their moment to take over the world.
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