Dissecting Slashers: A Bay of Blood (1971)

An Italian giallo gives American slashers some good ideas.

BACKGROUND

The Italian horror film A Bay of Blood is known by multiple different titles: Ecologia del delitto or Ecology of Crime, Reazione a catena or Chain Reaction, Carnage, Blood Bath, The Odor of Flesh / The Stench of Flesh, Antefatto or Before the Fact, Thus Do We Live to Be Evil, That Will Teach Them to Be Bad, and even, nonsensically and unofficially, Last House on the Left Part II, or New House on the Left. There’s also my favorite of the bunch and the first one I ever heard – Twitch of the Death Nerve. Whatever title may be on the copy you watch, it all started in the same way: screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti had a falling out with director Dario Argento while they were working together on the murder mystery (or, as the type of movie was called in Italy, a giallo) Il gatto a nove code / The Cat o’ Nine Tails. They had been writing the script together, but Argento had gotten the project started and wrote the 40 pages on his own – and since those pages were what got the film its production deal, he felt he should get sole screenplay credit. Sacchetti would get a story credit, but that would mean a substantial pay cut compared to what he would have gotten if he had been given a screenplay credit. Sacchetti objected and the whole thing blew up into a public feud between him, Argento, and the film’s producer... who also happened to be Argento’s father, Salvatore Argento.

This feud caught the attention of another producer, Dino De Laurentiis, and he suggested that Sacchetti get in contact with legendary filmmaker Mario Bava so they could make a giallo together – hoping the situation would turn out better for Sacchetti with Bava than it had with Argento. Sacchetti and Bava did get along quite well, coming up with the idea for a story called Cosi imparano a fare i cattivi, or That Will Teach Them to Be Bad. As reported in the book Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark, the idea centered on a couple that commits murder to secure a better future for their children – and end up having to “commit one murder after another in a chain reaction, becoming so caught up in their plan that they abandon their children for several days. When they return home, the starving and terrified children kill them.” Sacchetti and Bava also came up with thirteen murder scenes that Sacchetti and co-writer Franco Barbieri then had to figure out how to fit into the script. Unfortunately, Bava had issues with the production team, Barbieri was fired from the project, and Sacchetti quit in solidarity with his collaborator. So this project did not turn out better for him than The Cat o’ Nine Tails. And when The Cat o’ Nine Tails didn’t have much success outside of Italy, De Laurentiis figured there wasn’t much point in making something along the same lines as that failure and walked away from the Bava project, too.

Bava, on the other hand, was dealing with some serious tax issues, so he needed to get a movie into production. He took the idea to producer Giuseppe Zaccariello, who brought in writer Filippo Ottoni, who was reluctant to do the job because he didn’t like this sort of movie. But a script was cobbled together by Bava, Zaccariello, and Ottoni, with Sacchetti and Barbieri receiving story credit. And they got the film into production.

When filming began, the movie was still going by the title Cosi imparano a fare i cattivi, but it was soon changed to Reazione a catena. Then the filmmakers considered calling it La baia d'argento / The Bay of Silver, before settling on Ecologia del delitto / Ecology of Crime. Shot on an extremely low budget, the movie was primarily made at Zaccariello’s own beach house and the surrounding property. A lot of the scenes were meant to be shot in a forest, which did not exist in the area – so Bava would set up branches and leaves in front of the camera to provide the illusion of a forest.

This would be the most violent film Mario Bava ever made. The murders were a very important part of the whole thing, and Bava wanted them to look as realistic as possible. So special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi, who would go on to win Academy Awards for his work on the 1976 version of King Kong, Alien, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, was brought in to handle the bloodshed. The death scenes turned out to be so impressive, they helped inspire the slasher movie sub-genre that came into popularity at the end of the ‘70s and had a major boom in the 1980s.

SETTING

Filming took place in the Italian coastal town of Sabaudia, so we the film is set in such a location, just one that has more trees around it than the producer’s property had. There’s plenty of wandering around outside in the area, but much of the action takes place within the buildings that exist on the bay: the mansion owned by the Donatis, a couple murdered in the opening sequence; a failed, abandoned resort, complete with a nightclub and swimming pool; the home of a real estate agent; the home of the oddball Fossati couple; and the shack inhabited by standoffish fisherman Simon. Although most of the characters are driven to own property in this location, the bay isn’t the most picturesque place and it would have been easy to believe that it’s sitting beside any random lake rather than the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea (which is part of the Mediterranean Sea). If you look up Sabaudia online, it looks like a lovely place, but Bava managed to obscure its loveliness in this film. Of course, it helps that much of the film takes place at night, but the bay doesn't look very awe-inspiring even in the daylight.

KILLER(S)

A Bay of Blood is a very unique film in that there isn’t a single killer committing murders throughout the story. Instead, several different characters kill other characters at different points in the story. This approach is established right up front. 

The first character we meet is a little old lady in a wheelchair, Isa Miranda as Countessa Federica Donati. For minutes we just watch the Countessa wheel herself around in her home on a peaceful, rainy evening while pleasant music plays on the soundtrack. She looks out the window, raindrops run down the glass. Thunder rumbles harmlessly in the sky over the body of water near the house. She rolls herself through a doorway... then gasps at the sight of something we don't see ourselves. Black-gloved hands wrap a noose around her neck, her assailant kicks her wheelchair out from under her and the woman is hanged there in the doorway. Her killer is revealed to be a man, and we’ll come to find out he was the Countessa’s husband, Giovanni Nuvoletti as Count Filippo Donati. He removes his gloves and casually strolls around the house, looking around to make sure there were no potential witnesses around. He plants a forged suicide note and appears satisfied that he has committed the perfect murder. He doesn't get away with it for long. Mere minutes have passed when someone else, unseen by us, attacks the Count with a knife, stabbing him to death. He dies directly beneath the dangling corpse of his own victim. 

The film was designed from the start to feature thirteen murder scenes – and the eleven remaining murders are carried out by five other characters. Two of those characters are children who don’t realize what they’re doing. Two others are a couple that are killing people on a desperate quest to make sure the property that belonged to the film’s first two victims will go to them.

In the midst of this, there’s a character lurking around who’s presented in the way you can usually expect to see the killer in a slasher movie presented. He watches people, stalks them, and chooses when to strike, cutting them down with sharp implements. This is the aforementioned Simon, played by Claudio Volonté.

FINAL GIRL

Even in a movie where nearly everyone turns out to be a killer, there could have been a “Final Girl” in the story who’s surrounded by these killers and takes issue with what’s going on – or at least gets chased down in a “final witness” scenario. But Bava and his collaborators didn’t choose to include such a character. So the closest thing we get to a “Final Girl” is Renata Donati, played by Bond girl Claudine Auger (Thunderball). The daughter of the Count, she heads out to the bay with her husband Albert (Luigi Pistilli) when she hears that the Countessa has committed suicide and the Count has gone missing – but don’t expect her to be the heroine who solves the crime and saves the day. Her main goal is to make sure the Donati bay property is given to her, even if it means that she has to murder any other potential inheritors or the witnesses that see her committing criminal acts. (Or even acts that could be considered to be self-defense.)

As an alternative, you could say that Renata and Albert’s daughter (played by Nicoletta Elmi) is the Final Girl, since she’s the female character who survives the film, with their son (Renato Cestiè) being a Final Boy alongside her, but the kids are barely even in the movie.

VICTIMS

The film is populated with characters that are either crooked and greedy, or downright strange - with a few annoying characters sprinkled in. You will not care about a single one of them, they're just there to be slimy and get knocked off. Almost everyone is a killer, but those killers also become the victims of other killers.

Some characters are directly killers, but are complicit in murders, like real estate agent Frank Ventura (Chris Avram) and his secretary / lover, Laura (Anna Maria Rosati), who conspired with the Count to have his wife murdered in a way that would look like suicide.

There are a few innocent bystanders who get taken out along the way, though. The Fossati couple - insect-obsessed Paolo (Leopoldo Trieste) and the tarot card-reading Anna (Laura Betti) are odd characters, but they don't deserve the brutal murders they receive. Betti had worked with Bava on his film Hatchet for the Honeymoon the previous year and they were eager to work together again, so he worked her into A Bay of Blood.

More innocent victims are taken out in the sequence that has caused many viewers to consider this film to be a grandfather to the slasher subgenre. Running roughly twenty minutes, the proto-slasher stretch is a clear forerunner to the sort of movies that would be very popular in the '80s. It centers on four fun-loving youths - Brigitte Skay as Louise (or Brunhilde, depending on the version you watch), Paola Montenero / Paola Rubens as Sylvie (or Denise), Guido Boccaccini as Luca (or Duke), and Roberto Bonanni as Roberto (or Bobby) - who come driving into the bay area and immediately get up to no good... which leads to their deaths.

DEATHS

If you're a fan of the Friday the 13th franchise, you've probably heard A Bay of Blood brought up in comparison to the early films in that series, and the installment that most often gets compared to Bava's film is Part 2. It's easy to understand why when you watch them both. The 1981 F13 sequel has a murder scene that is identical to a murder scene in this 1971 film. It's a moment of two kills for the price of one, in fact. In both, a young couple is making love in bed when the killer enters the room and slams a spear straight through both of their bodies, through the bed, and all the way down to the floor, sticking the young lovers together as they die and pinning them to the bed. Like bugs on a board, you might say.

The fact that there's a victim in a wheelchair also draws comparisons to Friday the 13th Part 2, as does the setting, which is similar to most of the movies in the F13 franchise. There is another kill, in which one of the youngsters gets a billhook slammed into his face, that is compared to an F13 Part 2 kill involving a machete and is also reminiscent of an axe kill in the first Friday. There's also a decapitation that's somewhat similar to a decapitation seen in the first Friday.

Beyond the spearing, the blade to the face, and the decapitation, we get strangulations, stabbings, a throat slitting, another spearing, and even a couple of characters getting shot. Mario Bava wanted to make a movie with thirteen murders in it, and that's exactly what he brought to the screen.

CLICHÉS

Murders committed out of greed are a cliché in both cinema and the real world. Simon, the creepy loner who lives in a shack and murders people, isn't the most original character. Not surprisingly, the most cliché moments in A Bay of Blood are packed into the proto-slasher sequence. The fun-loving youths break into a couple of different locations and proceed to skinny-dip and have premarital sex while someone lurks around, watching them. There is imagery that will be quite familiar to fans of the slasher genre; the camera takes on the stalking prowler's P.O.V. as the partying young people are spied on from behind objects such as trees. One shot in particular, a P.O.V. shot from behind trees and twigs as we watch a naked girl walk down a dock to go skinny-dipping, could have come straight out of a Friday the 13th film.  

POSTMORTEM

Oddly, the fact that A Bay of Blood is often compared to Friday the 13th movies seems to be the biggest reason for its enduring popularity, more then fifty years after it was originally released. The movie was not a success when it reached theatres in Italy in '71, so distributors gave it multiple re-releases under different titles in an attempt to draw in more viewers. As expected when a movie from the '70s (and the '80s) had this sort of bloody violence, the critics were not kind to it, writing it off as a revolting failure.

But that bloody violence was a great selling point, which is why Hallmark Releasing, which specialized in exploitation films, acquired the U.S. distribution rights to the film in 1972. Having previously promoted their release of the film Mark of the Devil by claiming it was "Rated V for Violence," they promoted A Bay of Blood (which they first released under the title Carnage), as "The Second Film Rated V for Violence!" The Motion Picture Association of America ratings board was not amused, as they're they only group that can rate movies in the U.S., so they sued Hallmark Releasing and had they pull their Carnage marketing materials. Hallmark re-released the film under the awesome title Twitch of the Death Nerve. Rated R.

Hallmark kept the movie playing in grindhouses and at drive-ins for years, and it gained a cult following along the way. The film would often be sent out with another Hallmark release, the Wes Craven-directed, Sean S. Cunningham-produced The Last House on the Left - and when Cunningham decided that he was going to cash in on the 1978 success of Halloween by making a slasher movie called Friday the 13th, Hallmark provided a large chunk of the budget for that film. Cunningham has said that he somehow missed out on seeing A Bay of Blood until years later, but it's clear that the heads of Hallmark (who formed Georgetown Productions to produce Friday the 13th) wanted to make sure Cunningham's movie - and its first sequel - would have some kills like the ones in Bava's movie.

The kills in Bava's movie are a great reason to check it out, even if you're not given reason to care about any of the characters. The film is well-directed, bloody, and twisted.