I’ve found a lot of proto-slasher giallo films are still engrossing today due to not only the cinema-history lesson but also the stories and craft. Mario Bava’s “A Bay of Blood” (1971) is on a lot of lists of the greats, but while its value as an influencer can’t be denied, I found the story decidedly clunky and hard to take seriously.
Slasher concepts rise from the water
Strikingly, though, the Italian film with pre-planned English dubbing is in many ways “Friday the 13th” nine years before the actual “Friday the 13th.” The characters tend to be a little older, and instead of a killer stalking a campground for unknown reasons (revealed at the end), it’s a killer stalking the property that rings a bay’s shoreline (with motivations peppered throughout, in flashbacks).
We see stalker POV shots of young people partying (including a skinny-dipping woman), the killer uses sharp implements, and top-shelf practical gore effects punctuate the murders – including a twofer murder that “Friday the 13th” would shamelessly copy verbatim.
“A Bay of Blood” (1971)
Director: Mario Bava
Writers: Mario Bava, Giuseppe Zaccariello, Filippo Ottoni
Stars: Claudine Auger, Luigi Pistilli, Claudio Camaso
Bava is also the cinematographer, lushly capturing darks and daylights around the bay, which includes abandoned buildings and also some nice homes; the partiers sneak into one when the owners aren’t home, and the old woman who refuses to sell the land lives in the nicest house.
The plot of the criminals’ real-estate takeover is certainly “Bay of Blood’s” weak point. It’s convoluted yet rote; boil it down, and the goal is to slaughter everyone and acquire the land. While the actors and actresses look nice and do acceptable work, they all blend together in my head, partly because everyone’s motivations are so basic.
The final shot (Spoilers)
(SPOILERS FOLLOW.)
The final shot (pun intended) is pretty wild, though. “Bay of Blood” is categorized in part as a dark comedy on IMDb, and as I watched the film, I wondered if that’s merely an excuse for some of the cheesier scenes. The final incident is indeed pitch-black comedy, though.
The husband-and-wife schemers have completed their takeover by offing everyone connected to the land they desire. As we knew from earlier, they have a young son and daughter, who they leave in a camper while they do their scheming. Just as the adults toast their success, the kids pop up and shoot them dead with a shotgun; they believe the parents are merely “playing dead” and go off to play by the water.
The blunt reading is that the kids have been raised without close attention, and with mom and dad probably mentioning manipulation and murder too openly around them. Ironically, the one thing the parents take for granted as they scheme for a better life is their offspring, who prove their undoing. So they go from having nothing to seemingly having everything, but only for a moment, then they are dead. Maybe it’s a metaphor for life.
It’s also like a dark parody of a Hays Code-era ending wherein villains can’t, by rule, get away with it – as if Bava finished the screenplay and then the censors said “But they got away with it; that’s not allowed.” So the oblivious murderous children account for that, but it’s also more brutally shocking than anything before. But also funny in a macabre way.
(END OF SPOILERS.)
That ending doesn’t quite represent ingenious writing; it’s more like throw-it-at-the-wall gleefulness. It’s a microcosm of the whole film. The deeper psychology that underpins the elite giallo films isn’t present in “A Bay of Blood.” Yet in style and execution (pun intended), it couldn’t be clearer that it’s paving the way for Eighties American slashers, especially “Friday the 13th.”