See the introduction and full slate here.
This week we have giallo master against giallo master, as Mario Bava’s 1964 murder-in-a-fashion-house classic Blood and Black Lace:
Faces off against Dario Argento’s seminal 1970 debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage:
Gender matters in horror, and horror has a woman problem. We know this. The queasy mix of terror and comedy, the uncomfortable catharsis of violence, and the sexual allure of the monstrous have been staples of the horror film since our old friends Dracula and Frankenstein at least, and women have always occupied a peculiar place within that frame.
On the one hand, horror ought to be a natural women’s genre, and it can be. Horror digs into the truth of what frightens us, and no one is better used to living with latent dread than the average woman or girl from anywhere. No genre, at its best, can better capture the experience of living as a woman. On the other hand, horror films (like most films) are generally made by men - and when they’re made by men, they’re usually thoughtlessly made for men, too. They use female bodies as sites of terror, rather than presenting women’s experiences of terror.
No sub-genre has a worse reputation in this regard than the slasher film, and it’s a deserved reputation, make no mistake. Far from portraying the fear of being followed, something which most women have experienced, the average slasher leans on the thrill of following. The camera takes the POV of the killer, but rarely the killed; even when the perspective is apparently neutral, the gaze can be so pitiless and voyeuristic that the film can amount to pornography.
The death of women’s bodies are lovingly photographed. You see every wound, hear every gasp and cry. Worse still, rarely do you learn much about any of these women before they die; they’re entirely disposable. They’re interchangeable.
Blood and Black Lace and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage each have an interesting relationship with the way horror and gender work together. They share more than the style and color pallette typical of the films of Bava and Argento. They share (and I am going to spoil you) the same twist ending: we find that the killer, who we had assumed was a man, is actually a couple, a woman and a man, killing in turns. In neither case is it entirely clear which of the pair is dominant. Each film forces us to reckon with our assumptions of who makes a victim and who makes a predator.
This scene from TBwtCP may seem like a typical one from a violent horror film: a beautiful woman is in peril, a man tries to save her. We don’t know until the end of the film that the woman is the danger.
Argento’s film, as you can see from this scene, is preoccupied with seeing across boundaries, and with the near impossibility of communicating across them. It’s important that his protagonist is an American abroad in Italy, one who misjudges nearly everything he sees. He wants to put a woman into the role of victim, and doesn’t realize how much he has to fear from her.
Blood and Black Lace is less subtle in its aspirations; its play with gender and seeing is textual rather than subtextual. It takes place in a fashion house - the way we look at women’s bodies and treat them as disposable and interchangeable is baked into the story. Models die one by one, and other models begin wearing their clothes and taking their place on the runway.
In the dreamy, beautiful credit sequence, notice how each actor is placed next to a mannequin. The male actors are too, but their corresponding mannequins are headless, unclothed, made of straw. The women are next to fully clothed figures with wigs, posed provocatively, embracing. They’re interchangeable.
We hardly get to know most of the women in this film, apart from the salon manager and designer Christina, but they all insist on their individuality. Isabella is the first model to die; her boss’s main concern is that no one can take her place in a runway show the following day. Christina approaches each of the models, asking them to wear Isabella’s scheduled dress. They each refuse; they don’t want to wear the clothes of a dead girl. They don’t want to be interchangeable.
I’m not saying that Blood and Black Lace is a feminist film; it isn’t. It also isn’t lazy; it is aware of the place women take in violent horror and is interested in interrogating that place. The women in this film aren’t mere bodies, no matter that they are killed in increasingly creative and sickening ways. They refuse to be that; even when Christina and her lover are revealed as the murderers, Christina refuses to accept his plan and his wishes. She kills him before he can kill her. She won’t be put in a box.
This is a difficult decision; probably the most difficult one so far. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was made six years later, and the advances show. It’s more technically proficient, subtler, more refined, glossier. The acting is better. Blood and Black Lace is messier, more ambitious, and more beautiful. Dario Argento knew how to use the color red, but no one used the color red like Mario Bava. Bava’s use of color is masterful, most especially in this film. Red is everywhere; we can’t help but see the fashion house as an inherently violent place. Everything helps the story Bava is telling.
If I’ve proven anything so far, it’s that I’ll almost always pick beautiful and messy over slickly proficient. I don’t want to damn The Bird with the Crystal Plumage with faint praise. It really is beautiful, but my heart belongs to Bava. The feminist in me is ashamed at picking either, but she’ll live.