Kill, Baby…. Kill!, Mario Bava’s 1966 masterpiece, opens at the turn of the 20th Century.

In a small German village, a woman named Irena Hollander (Mirella Panfili) runs up a set of stairs at an abandoned church.  From the bell tower, she either falls or deliberately jumps and crashes into the sharp spikes of the gate below.  Agck!  Falling from that high of a spot is bad enough without then landing on a gate and getting pierced by several sharp points at once.  Making it even more disturbing is that it’s suggested that the spikes don’t instantly kill Irena.  It’s a grotesque and disturbing image, shown to us in bright color.  It’s death as pop art.  It’s the sort of thing that only Mario Bava could have paid off.

Dr. Paul Eswai (Giacomo Rossi Stuart) is summoned to the village by Inspector Kruger (Piero Lulli).  Kruger suspects that Irena may have been intentionally pushed and he wants Paul to conduct an autopsy.  However, the superstitious townspeople say that her body must be buried immediately and Paul and Kruger actually have to rush out to the local cemetery to prevent the Irena from being buried.  The gravediggers warn Paul and Kruger that they will be bringing a curse on themselves by not burying Irena.  Paul and Kruger don’t listen.  At the autopsy, a local medical student named Monica (Erika Blanc) is assigned to serve as the witness.  Paul discovers that a silver coin has somehow been embedded in Irena’s heart.

Paul discovers that the villagers live in fear of the ghost a little girl.  They claim that if you see the girl, that means you are cursed to die.  Paul, being a man of science, is skeptical.  When the daughter of the local innkeeper becomes horrified after saying that she has seen the little girl, Paul is critical of the treatment offered up by her superstitious parents.  (That treatment include a chain of leeches — agck!)  Meanwhile, Kruger goes to the estate of the mysterious Baroness Graps (Giovanna Galletti) and disappears!  It soon becomes clear that the key to mystery lies in the estate of the Baroness and her past.  Karl (Luciano Catenacci), the burgomaster, knows the secret of the Baroness but soon, he finds himself being targeted by the little girl.

Maria Bava is a director who has been cited as an influence by everyone from David Lynch to Martin Scorsese and Kill, Baby…. Kill! is his masterpiece, a work of horrific pop art that is full of atmosphere, creative use of color, and an intentionally surreal style of plotting that makes the film less a standard story and more of a filmed nightmare.  Towards the end, as Paul pursues the ghost of the little girl, an overhead view of a special staircase, lit in blues and greens, brings to mind Hitchock’s Vertigo while the village itself feels as if it could have been transported over from a Hammer horror film.  Paul is a man of science and the villages are people of superstition and, in the end, both seem to be equally destructive.  Paul is too quick to dismiss the old traditions while the villagers are too quick to put their faith in herbs and incantations.  Bava creates an atmosphere in which everyone seems to be equally doomed.

Of course, the main reason why Kill, Baby…. Kill! works is because that little girl (played by Valerio Vali, about whom little is known) is absolutely terrifying.  When she suddenly shows up at a window and stares straight at her latest victim, it’s a true jump scare.  She had an intense stare but, even worse, she seems to be so happy after she’s cursed someone.  The true horror is that she can basically pop up anywhere.  It doesn’t matter if you’re a good person or a rational person or someone who doesn’t even believe in ghosts.  Fate cannot be escaped.

Kill, Baby…. Kill! is a both a story of nightmarish horror and a love letter to pure cinema.

Kill, Baby, Kill