Blood and Black Lace

So in the meantime, people start dying at this, um, fashion, uh, kind of, uh, house.

And the funny thing about the fashion house is that unlike, I mean, it's g- another trope of the giallo, uh, going back to l- um, M- Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace, um, where you have, uh, murders around a fashion house, and it's been in everything, The Crimes of the Black Cat.

That means lots of giallo have kind of had the whole models versus murderers aesthetic, which, which is, which is great.

So you have the, the beautiful women and the mad murderer.

Um, his longtime servant is there, of course, uh, Luigi Pagazzi, uh, Pagazzi, uh, who's in a bunch of Antonio Margheriti movies.

He's in, uh, Blood and Black Lace, uh, Mario Bava.

He's just one of the most quintessential Italian character actors of all time.

They call him the Italian Peter Lorre, and most of his role is silent.

I would say...

Films like Peeping Tom, Psycho and Mario Barber's films, The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace, you know, they walked.

So films like Black Christmas and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween could run.

I mean, even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre also took some inspiration from that.

Alone in her apartment, Jane is once again menaced by Mark, who somehow manages to make his way in, even though the door is locked.

Here, Martino utilises lighting similar to that used by Mario Bava on Blood and Black Lace, and later by Argento in Suspiria.

When Jane first telephones Barbara for help, we see her apartment is lit with a sickly green tinge, and when Mark finally makes his way inside Jane's flat, the scene is suddenly lit with a vibrant bright red.

Here again we have evidence of Martino and editor Eugenio Alabiso's jagged cutting technique, as Mark approaches Jane in a series of jerky and repeating edits, a brilliantly effective moment made all the more so by the fact that, after he attacks her with a knife, he completely disappears.

It's so similar to so many other titles.

I think of like Blood and Black Lace, for example, another film about the fashion industry with a gloved, mysterious murderer who is killing fashion models.

When I was watching Eyes of Lorimar, I immediately thought of Dario Argento with Deep Red and Tenebrae, both of which have that killer perspective following who's going to get murdered and the gloves and the black backgrounds, the colorful backgrounds.

And I definitely saw it when I was watching the film.

Loza Jalloh, it looks like, doesn't it? Yeah.

So, Mario Barber's Blood and Black Lace, The Fourth Man, Baby Blood, which we mentioned on the show just last week with John Crinnan talking about bad taste.

Obviously, he saw Baby Blood.

The Strange Vice of Mrs.

Ward, Stage Fright, Dario Argento's Deep Red, which we've covered on this show in the past.

And obviously, you're a big Jalloh guy, aren't you, Terrell?

yeah so like when i saw that lineup it was like just an instant right i need to just get the full full pass uh blood and black lace is my favorite shallow film so that's the thought of seeing that on a cinema screen is just like wow i never it's one of those things where i'm like i never thought i'd ever be able to watch that in cinema so that alone was like i'm there and then like deep red classic which i really really like stage fright i can't remember what i really thought about it but then again i think just i don't think you get there's many opportunities to watch shallow films in the cinema, even in an independent cinema in London, like the Prince Charles cinema.

They don't really screen that many shallow films.

Gosey is fabulous in this film and I think it was his role that kept my attention the most.

He's a great genre character actor that pops up in lots of movies, most notably the Barver films Blood and Black Lace and Barren Blood.

He has over 100 credits to his name and is always a joy to be seen on screen.

Lycanthropus was an enjoyable watch, but as with a lot of films from this era, it suffers a lot with drops in action.

So in 1968, the giallo barely existed as a coherent genre, as we've just said.

Bava had already made The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace earlier in the decade, and between them, those two films established much of what we now recognize as giallo iconography, so the masked killer, the fashion house, the black gloves.

But none of that had yet taken hold.

So for the remainder of the '60s, Italian thrillers appeared sporadically rather than the dozens that would follow once Argento's Bird with the Crystal Plumage properly initiated the boom, still two years away or so when Deborah goes into production.

Deborah, several years later, folds a very similar structure into a considerably bigger budget and starrier cast, the money riding on who survives whom, the staged suicide, the sense that everyone might be lying to everyone else.

There's no killer stalking anyone in either film, no one in black gloves, and no high body count.

Both are conspiracy thrillers that happen to be filed under giallo in the looser sense of the term rather than giallo cast in the mold Bava had already established with Blood and Black Lace.

The same conspiracy for money structure recurs throughout Gastaldi's later work, too.