Marguerite would leave her ma- cabre impression on other directors as well. She would be the obvious blueprint for the monstrous old woman played by Sarah Ferretti, who becomes her own younger daughter (Rosanna Schiaffino) in Damiano Damiani’s La strega in amore/The Witch in Love (1966, an adaptation of Carlos Fuentes’ classic story “Aura”), an inarguable source of in- spiration for Dario Argento’s diaboli- cal Mater Suspiriorum in Suspiria (1977) and of course, the obvious genesis for the twin characters of Princesses Asa and Katia in Bava’s La maschera del demonio. Another element introduced by I
vampiri and shared by other Italian horror films is the central emphasis on the fireplace of
the Castle Du
Grand, which secretly communicates with the family crypt. This depiction of the family hearth as a passage to family secrets (as also seen in the con- temporaneous The Black Sleep, 1956) would be most prominently reprised in La maschera del demonio, and again by Bava in La frusta e il corpo, but it also appears in many other Italian horror films, including Massimo Pupillo’s Il boia scarlatto/Bloody Pit of Horror (1965). The dominant use of such a fixture takes on a special sig- nificance in Bava’s hands when one remembers that his father Eugenio (and therefore, the Bava family) first became involved in the cinema when he was recruited by Pathé Frères to sculpt a fireplace frame for a silent movie. Therefore, in a sense, the cen- trality of the fireplace in this and many other Italian horror films might be read as a tribute to Eugenio Bava—consciously by his son, and unconsciously by his imitators. Had Freda directed the entire film as planned, or had Bava directed from the outset of filming, I vampiri would surely have become a more consistent viewing experience. In- stead, it is more of a successful res- cue than a successful film, wherein evidence of competent haste and above-average ingenuity is indistin- guishable from attractive, yet erratic and occasionally sloppy filmmaking. Scenes of stately, elegiac pacing are
