dir. Mario Bava cast Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, Eirka Blanc, Fabienne Dali, Piero Lulli, Luciano Catenacci
In a remote Eastern European village around 1907, Paul, a
young coroner, arrives to conduct an autopsy on a young servant girl who died
in mysterious circumstances. Assisted by the beautiful Monica, a
recently-returned local with nurse’s training, he finds a gold coin embedded in
the victim’s heart. Soon, other people begin dying in ways that suggest
suicide, but what drove them to commit these acts remains a mystery. Perhaps
the deaths are connected with a strange little girl in white who appears to the
victims before their deaths and of whom the villagers seem deathly afraid…
Italian director Mario Bava was a master of
atmospheric horror films and, on that score, this is every bit as impressive an
achievement as his better-known Black
Sunday. The village is filled with large, crumbling stone buildings, narrow
alleyways, and cobweb –covered rooms. The nighttime settings and perpetual fogs
give the film a powerful dreamlike quality, as figures fade in and out of the
darkness and a mournful bell tolls, heralding each death. The English-language
title makes this sound like a slasher film, which it most assuredly is not (the
original Italian title translates as Operation
Fear). In fact, this has more in common with the early Hammer films or even
the Universal films of 30 years before than with the slashers (like Bava’s own Twitch of the Death Nerve) that came
along just a few years later. The plot is fairly clichéd as outsider Paul
stubbornly refuses to believe in the supernatural until faced with
incontrovertible proof and contributes to one character’s death because of his
insistence on modern medicine over traditional methods to ward off evil. But
plot isn’t the point here and this is rivaled only by Black Sunday and perhaps City
of the Dead as the most effectively atmospheric horror of the 1960s.
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