BAVA’S diagram for the apparatus needed to film Dora’s incubus visitation in SCHOCK.
rolled, the platform was turned like a rotisserie. Because Nicolodi was so thin, the shot evinces absolutely no shifting of gravity and only her hair appears to be moving, Medusa-like, around her pleasured eyes and sa- lacious lip-licking as she is pos- sessed by the ghost. “When Mario drew the storyboards, he included a diagram that showed exactly how the shot was to be achieved,” says Lamberto Bava. “The way the scene was shot was exactly how it was designed on the drawing board.” The subjective sequences of Dora’s hallucinations were also shot live: rippling the image by photograph- ing it through Mario’s “water glass,” stretching the image by filming it through glass that could be tipped toward or away from the lens, and stacking the image into totems by filming the actors’ reflections in the mirrored shelves positioned below and above their faces. “The great thing about Mario Bava,” John Steiner emphasizes, “. . . he just had fabulous technique. His effects were amazingly simple, usually done with lighting effects or clever cutting. I remember there was one thing he did, which was fabu- lous. He had a little piece of glass, which he had obviously had made for him, and it had a ripple on it. He would take this piece of glass and just move it up in front of the camera as it was shooting, and it looked as if a wave of water—or optical water, as it were—came down and veiled the scene. I was very impressed by that, I remember. Spagnoli was probably op- erating the camera, and Bava would be holding a rippled sheet of glass, manipulating the glass, by hand, in front of the lens, bringing up the ripple at the time he wanted it to appear. Bava wasn’t a writer, per se, but he had this great eye for visual effects— always very simply done—which came out of an innate sense of knowing how things work on the studio floor.” Other live effects include the ani- mated empty swing and moving
