Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace is not just a film—it’s a blood-soaked fashion show where everyone’s dressed to kill, literally. Released in 1964, it was a box-office dud in its day, but hindsight has a funny way of cleaning up corpses. Today it looks like the prototype for every giallo, slasher, and stylized murder spree that came after. It’s as if Bava invented the entire vocabulary of horror cinema while sneaking into a couture house with a can of Technicolor paint and a butcher’s knife.
The setup is simple: a Roman fashion house full of beautiful women, one scandalous diary, and a killer in a white mask who stalks the premises like a mannequin that learned how to stab. The models are glamorous, the men are suspicious, and the police are about as useful as an umbrella in a hurricane.
But who cares about the plot? This isn’t Sherlock Holmes. This is fashion week in Hell, and Bava is the devil with a camera.
The Plot That Barely Matters
The film opens with Isabella, a model who doesn’t last long enough for us to learn her inseam. She’s murdered on the grounds of the fashion house, strangled by the masked killer who looks like the Phantom of the Opera’s intern. The police suspect everyone, which is fair, since every character behaves like they have at least one corpse buried in the garden.
The true MacGuffin is Isabella’s diary, a tell-all journal that reads like a Vogue exposé crossed with a police blotter. Every model, manager, and hanger-on wants it, either to destroy the evidence or to make sure nobody finds out about their coke habit, abortion, or homicidal tendencies. This is the kind of diary that could start a dozen divorces, get you excommunicated, and maybe even topple the government. Naturally, it turns the fashion house into a killing field.
The murders are staged like diabolical ballet numbers: a spiked glove here, a face pushed into a red-hot furnace there. By the time a model is burned alive in what looks like a kiln from Satan’s pottery class, you realize you’re not watching a whodunnit so much as a “who-cares-who-dunnit.”
Style as Substance
Let’s not pretend Bava was worried about plot coherence. He wasn’t. He was too busy painting with light. The film is a kaleidoscope of lurid reds, blues, and greens—colors so saturated you expect the projectionist to hand you sunglasses. The fashion house is a cathedral of mirrors and mannequins, a place where beauty and death become indistinguishable.
Bava shoots murders like runway shows. A victim staggers into the frame, lit by a purple spotlight, and collapses in a tableau of silk and blood. Even Hitchcock never made homicide look this fabulous. The camera doesn’t ask, “Who killed her?” The camera purrs, “Darling, does this strangulation make me look thin?”
The Cast: Draped in Couture, Draped in Fear
Eva Bartok plays Contessa Cristiana, the widow co-managing the fashion house. She looks like she could run both Milan Fashion Week and a small coup d’état before lunch. Cameron Mitchell, as Massimo, her co-conspirator and sometime murderer, wears the weary look of a man who took this role because the check cleared. Together they’re the homicidal Sonny and Cher of Roman haute couture.
The models are archetypes, not characters: the junkie, the gossip, the innocent, the one with a rich fiancé, the one with secrets that would make a priest sweat. Their job is to look stunning and then die beautifully, which they do with commitment.
The Birth of the Giallo, or: Why Bava Was Decades Ahead
Critics at the time didn’t know what to make of Blood and Black Lace. Too gaudy for a mystery, too violent for polite company, too disinterested in plot for serious cinema. What they didn’t realize was that Bava was laying the foundation for the giallo: Italian thrillers that combined eroticism, sadism, and surreal color palettes.
Every slasher owes him royalties. Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, John Carpenter’s Halloween, even the Friday the 13th franchise—they’re all playing in Bava’s bloodstained sandbox. The masked killer, the fetishistic focus on the murder weapon, the female victim bathed in lurid lighting—this is the DNA of modern horror.
Watching it now is like finding a time capsule with the blueprints for an entire genre.
The Humor in the Horror
One of the film’s great ironies is that the police inspector, the man tasked with solving the case, is essentially a prop. He interviews suspects, makes grand pronouncements, and arrests the wrong people. He’s the Inspector Clouseau of giallo, but without the mustache. The real detectives are the audience—we’re the ones piecing together the motives while the inspector stumbles from corpse to corpse.
And oh, the motives. A diary, an inheritance, jealousy, cocaine addiction—this isn’t Agatha Christie. This is All My Children with spiked gloves.
There’s a kind of black comedy in how casually Bava dispatches his models. A woman leaves rehearsal, and you know she’s about to be murdered. Another gets into her car, and you know she’s about to be smothered. It’s like an Italian soap opera written by the Grim Reaper, with couture gowns for costumes.
The Joy of Camp
What makes Blood and Black Lace endure is its commitment to excess. The acting is melodramatic, the dubbing is wooden, and the story is thinner than chiffon. But none of that matters, because the film has style to burn. The lighting, the set design, the fetishistic close-ups of gloves and knives—it’s operatic horror.
This is not a film you watch for logic. This is a film you watch for mood. For the way the camera lingers on a mannequin’s face, making it eerier than any corpse. For the way a murder is framed like a fashion spread in Vogue, but with arterial spray instead of perfume.
If Hitchcock gave us murder as a parlor game, Bava gives us murder as a catwalk.
Conclusion: Murder Never Looked So Good
Blood and Black Lace failed at the box office in 1964, but its influence is everywhere. Without it, there is no Argento, no Halloween, no Suspiria, no endless parade of masked killers chasing teenagers through the suburbs.
It’s lurid, trashy, and beautiful. It’s a film that makes violence look like art and art look like violence. Watching it, you feel both guilty and delighted, like sneaking into a gallery and realizing all the paintings are crime scenes.
Three and a half out of four stars. And a reminder: if you’re working at a Roman fashion house and someone hands you a diary, maybe burn it immediately—before it burns you.
