Holiday Buying Guide

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In the 60s, the Italian film industry could imitate almost any kind of movie — Westerns, thrillers, historical epics — and, in doing so, transform them into some weirder, more voluptuous, molto Italiano. Bava was the director who took the Gothic horror genre and gave it a dank, eerie, sexy sheen. His first, the witchcrafty Black Sunday (1960), made the dark-haired, ashen-faced English actress Barbara Steele the prom queen of scare movies. The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) was a subtle precursor to the Italian slasher pictures known as "gialli." Then Bava moved from black-and-white to color — the film was Black Sabbath (1963), a triptych of tales with Boris Karloff — and quickly proved himself a master of evocative tonality. Also on the program are two 1966 chillers: Knives of the Avenger, a quicky mix of Viking drama and spaghetti Western, and another occult tale, Kill, Baby... Kill, which Martin Scorsese has acknowledged as an influence on his career. Horror fan or cinephile, you can become addicted to this stuff, but that's OK. In October, Anchor Bay put out a second Bava volume, of the director's (slightly less fabulous) work in the late 60s and 70s.

— Richard Corliss