The slasher genre exploded in the 1980s thanks to the success of Halloween and Friday the 13th. Those films showed that a lot of money could be made from very small budgets, and most audiences had never seen Horror/Thrillers of that type. But, their success didn’t just appear out of thin air, and as part of the project I’ve traced early films like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None which inspired German Krimi Thrillers from stories by Edgar Wallace – still a ways away, but there are a lot of them – which led to Italian giallo and ultimately American slashers. Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (1971) is often cited as one of the first and most influential slashers, but I think you can go back even further to Blood and Black Lace.
Black Lace takes place in a fashion boutique, where the glamorous façade hides various illegal activity. While everyone tries to get their hands on a secret diary, someone begins killing off beautiful fashion models. The plot is classic whodunit, though Bava is better at style than airtight plotting. In terms of style, this is Bava’s Suspiria, and now that I’ve seen the 4K restoration, I can safely say it’s one of the most visually dazzling films ever made. The violence is brutal, more than you would expect from so long ago, but not grotesque. While I often don’t appreciate Bava as much as others, there’s a lot here to recommend.
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