If Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby, Kill had a motto, it might be: “Go big or go baroque.” A swirling fever dream of gothic excess, doll-eyed ghosts, and staircase vertigo, it’s the kind of film where logic politely excuses itself at the door, and narrative coherence is found sobbing in a candlelit hallway. It’s not a masterpiece, but it feels like one—right up until the script falls on its face and someone forgets to bring the budget.
There’s a lot to like in Kill, Baby, Kill, particularly if your cinematic diet includes equal parts decaying mansions and slow-motion dread. But for every moment of eerie brilliance, there’s another that stumbles like a drunk villager on Bava’s soundstage gravel road. This is less a horror film and more a beautifully lit séance held inside an opium-induced dreamscape.
The Plot: Ghost Girls and Gaslighting
Let’s be honest: the plot of Kill, Baby, Kill is the narrative equivalent of wandering in circles through the same hallway over and over while a seven-year-old girl with a creepy bouncing ball stares into your soul like she’s considering peeling it for soup. Dr. Paul Eswai (Giacomo Rossi Stuart), a man who has clearly never seen a horror movie in his life, arrives in the cursed village of Karmingam to investigate mysterious deaths. These deaths involve silver coins, spectral children, and supernatural revenge, which—spoiler alert—are all warning signs to leave and never come back. But Dr. Eswai is a man of science, and science says: poke it with a stick and see what happens.
Soon, he’s teamed up with Monica (Erika Blanc), a medical student and the walking personification of “I don’t get paid enough for this.” Together they try to make sense of a town where the walls bleed, the dead won’t stay buried, and the doll collection may actually be watching you.
The haunting culprit? Melissa Graps, a child ghost who makes Damien from The Omen look like a Pez dispenser. She giggles, she shows up in mirrors, she compels people to kill themselves with sharp objects lying around the house. Typical misunderstood Victorian child stuff.
A Triumph of Atmosphere… and Not Much Else
Visually, Kill, Baby, Kill is Bava doing what he does best: transforming dust, cobwebs, and fog machines into high art. Shadows stretch like rubber bands, staircases seem to lead into the ninth circle of hell, and every candelabra looks like it was selected from Satan’s bridal registry. This is gothic horror through a kaleidoscope, full of swirling mist, cracked tombstones, and chandeliers that might fall just because they feel like it.
But once you stop swooning over the visuals, a question arises: what the hell is happening? It’s hard to tell whether you’re watching a psychological thriller, a supernatural horror, or a particularly bleak episode of Scooby-Doo. Characters wander in and out of the story like they’ve just remembered they left something on the stove. The plot folds back on itself, has a panic attack, and then collapses into exposition delivered in monologues so melodramatic they make Dark Shadowslook restrained.
The Cast: Moods Over Method
Giacomo Rossi Stuart does his best as Dr. Eswai, whose approach to supernatural terror is “act mildly annoyed and demand more science.” Erika Blanc, meanwhile, plays Monica like she’s permanently disoriented—and to be fair, that may have been method acting, considering Bava reportedly made up large chunks of the script as filming went on. Fabienne Dali’s witch, Ruth, is a highlight: think of her as the spooky cousin you’d want on your side if you ever got trapped in a Tim Burton version of The Price Is Right.
Then there’s Melissa Graps, the ghost girl. Played by a young boy in a wig (yes, really), she achieves maximum creep factor by doing almost nothing. She just appears, with her little ball and dead eyes, like a nightmare version of Shirley Temple after spending too much time in the wine cellar.
Production Woes and Spooky Improvisation
Let’s not pretend this was a well-oiled machine. Bava, broke and frustrated, essentially built this haunted mansion with duct tape and a fog machine. F.U.L. Films ran out of money during production, so cast and crew reportedly finished without knowing if they’d be paid. In other words: you may not like your day job, but at least no one asked you to finish a ghost movie for free while dodging plaster chunks and continuity errors.
The score, lifted from stock music, shifts awkwardly between eerie and elevator. Sometimes it fits the mood; sometimes it feels like someone dropped a needle on the wrong record and just ran with it.
Final Verdict: Beauty and the Bleh
Kill, Baby, Kill is like discovering a haunted Fabergé egg: gorgeous, cryptic, and slightly cracked. It’s easy to see why it’s been championed by horror directors and die-hard genre fans—it bleeds style from every pore. But as a film, it’s often frustrating, confused, and paced like a funeral march for a character you never met.
It won’t keep you up at night, unless you’re the kind of person who lies awake wondering how a ghost child maintains such perfectly parted bangs.
★★★☆☆ (3 out of 5)
One star for Bava’s dreamy cinematography, one for the haunting atmosphere, and one for Melissa Graps, the dead girl with the creepiest game of kickball in film history. But don’t come for a coherent story or riveting performances—come for the visuals, and stay for the existential dread.
