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The ruptures of fear, Mario Bava orchestrates three of its faces, an Italianate Kwaidan. First, "The Telephone." ("It rings and you run," says Degas to Valéry.) Luxurious apartment, party girl (Michèle Mercier) quivering in a negligee, raspy voice on the receiver. "Who's this?" "You'll find out right before you die." Estranged lovers and contrasting vengeance, one is a pair of eyes near the closed shutters and the other is a Sapphic flame embodied as the knife under the pillow. The panning camera gives a Manet view of a cadaver at the close, thus La Voix Humaine as giallo blueprint. "The Drop of Water" is the concluding segment, another use of a dissolving female psyche as the linchpin for pure mise en scène. A vexed caretaker (Jacqueline Pierreux) prepares the late clairvoyant ("Talking to the dead, there's a good cure for you!"), a sapphire ring is pried off the lifeless finger and the buzzing insect of guilt won't be placated. The shock is set up by the iambic pentameter of dripping faucets, an empty rocking chair abruptly, gruesomely occupied. Bava's centerpiece is "The Wurdulak," a tragic epic brought down to Gothic sketch size. Howling wind and decaying light are the elements of Mitteleuropa in the grip of winter, out of the cold staggers none other than Boris Karloff as the patriarch with an open wound in his chest and a decapitated head in his hands. "Bloodthirsty corpses" prey on loved ones, so falls the family, survivalist dread is no match for emotional instinct when the undead child begins scratching at the door. (Polanski benefits from this most opulently in The Fearless Vampire Killers.) The coda is a charming bit of Cinecittà illusionism elided in the American version, on to Jodorowsky it trickles. "Remember, vampires go to the movies, too!" Cinematography by Ubaldo Terzano.
--- Fernando F. Croce |