Telephones are as bright a red as the lush curtains that divide the private chambers of the fashion salon setting-a beautiful inexplicability that’s deeply disturbing in a film with many such gestures. Purples, reds, golds, greens, blues, and occasional stark whites inform the images, motivated by subjective rather than objective instincts. Diverging from the black-and-white aesthetic of many noirs, and of prior thrillers and horror films like The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Black Sunday, Bava lavishes Blood and Black Lace with an explosive tapestry of hues that suggests a fevered dream state, mirroring the repressed desires and crimes of the characters.īava floods the eye with stimulation, overwhelming our senses so much that the subtle and ingenious plot rushes by in a blur-an effect that would come to be a major component of the giallo. In fact, the film still feels new-particularly Bava’s astonishing use of color, especially compared to the anemic palettes in which contemporary American horror films routinely traffic. Lucas’s commentary allows modern viewers to imagine the newness that Blood and Black Lace represented for the thriller genre at the time of its release, though it was a financial disappointment that gained cultural cachet retrospectively.
As Bava’s biographer Tim Lucas observes in the audio commentary on this disc, the giallo remains alive today, when other distinctively Italian film subgenres have faded into the past. Due to the subsequent film careers of Bava and famed compatriots like Dario Argento, giallo came to be associated with a violently free-associative blend of crime and horror film.
With Blood and Black Lace, Mario Bava took a major step toward recasting the term giallo, literally Italian for yellow, which was once more generically associated with detective-type thrillers, particularly paperbacks with yellow covers that included the work of writers such as Agatha Christie and Edgar Wallace.
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