after their brief theatrical bookings and those of us who were marked by them, whether we encountered them in theaters or on late night televi- sion, could replay them only in memory. Today—thanks largely to the efforts of Alfredo Leone—the ma- jority of Bava’s once-elusive cata- logue is now available on VHS and DVD, and beautifully restored 35mm prints of most of Bava’s films have been struck for repertory bookings and retrospective screenings. The re- newed availability of his work, the freedom extended to film buffs and scholars to examine it at their lei- sure—frame-by-frame, if desired— has resulted in a widespread redis- covery of Mario Bava, as well as a serious critical reassessment of his contribution to cinema. Of those who preceded him as spe- cialists in the horror genre—Tod Browning in the 1920s and ’30s, James Whale in the 1930s, Jacques Tourneur in the 1940s, and Terence Fisher in the 1950s, to pick the truly emblematic names—they are all re- membered, but for the most part (with the exception of Tourneur, whose touch was evident in M. Night Shyamalan’s 1999 success The Sixth Sense), the ac- tive influence of these filmmakers has begun to run dry. When the films of Browning, Whale, and Fisher do in- spire contemporary directors, the re- sulting works tend to be nostalgic rather than progressive. In the de- cades which have passed since Bava’s death—since Friday the 13th, since the advent of home video—there have been surprisingly few positive or stable in- novations in the horror genre beyond his example.
In his own directorial career, Joe Dante—one of the first American crit- ics to pay his respects to Bava’s work— has continued to acknowledge Bava as a major source of inspiration, no- tably in the saturated color lighting schemes of his “It’s A Good Life” epi- sode in Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) and Gremlins (1984). His 1985 Twi- light Zone episode “Shadow Man” fea- tured a boogeyman character explic- itly modelled on Baron von Kleist from Baron Blood.
LOOKING quite dapper with an umbrella, flowers, and white gloves, circa 1950.
