This is the English translation of an interview with director Mario Bava conducted by Alfredo Castelli and Tito Monego. The interview was originally published in Italian, in the Italian monthly magazine Horror, in December 1969. You can find more info about Italian horror movies in the monograph Vampires in Italian Cinema, 1956-1975 (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). If you are interested in buying the book, feel free to use the launch discount code EVENT30 for 30% off.
Castelli & Monego: Mr Bava, your films made you famous as the “Hitchcock of Cinecittà”. Why did you choose terror as a form of expression?
Mario Bava: I don’t know. Terror fascinates me and attracts me for no particular reason. Maybe it’s a psychological thing. In real life I am easily scared, so when I shoot a horror movie it’s as if I am taking revenge on fear itself. The lights, the technicians and the actors on set make me overcome situations that, in real life, would scare me to death.
C&M: What is your idea of “terror”?
MB: Terror is what is inside ourselves. Terror is what is released in nightmares or in madness. Terror is what makes objects around us turn into living and scary entities, when we find ourselves alone in a dark room…
C&M: Sounds like Edgar Allan Poe…
MB: More or less. In cinema, the “monster” doesn’t exist anymore. We are the monsters.
C&M: Mr Bava, in your films we often see scary creatures, vampires and repugnant beings. Doesn’t this contradict what you have just said?
MB: Unfortunately, yes. These are the laws of the market. My films are exported in many countries, especially in the USA and the UK, and over there they can’t conceive of a [horror] movie without “creatures”. Have you seen Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)? It’s a great film, with exceptional acting and direction. But they couldn’t refrain from showing the devil as a sort of scaly Frankenstein, which is quite ridiculous. In the original version of the film they even showed Rosemary’s child… A baby with yellow eyes and little horns on his head – a sight to make you weep. Luckily they cut this scene in the Italian version… Moreover, from a psychological point of view, the monsters don’t work with our [Italian] audience. In the audience there is always someone who wants to be the funny guy, and rightly so. I saw Gamera vs. Guiron (Noriaki Yuasa, 1969) recently: the papier-mâché gorilla was fighting the clay dinosaur and, at every blow, ten skyscrapers collapsed. At some point, a jeep full of soldiers approached the monsters… possibly to make things more suspenseful. A guy in the audience shouted “Here comes the army to separate the contenders!”, and none of us in the theater could take the film seriously anymore… Filmmakers should never offer spectators this kind of psychological hooks. If there is a creaking door or a shadow slowly moving in a corridor, the audience will soon “destroy” the scene with a funny joke. If the shock effect is instantaneous, however, the spectators will literally jump on their seats.
C&M: Just like in the famous scene of Wait until Dark (Terence Young, 1967), with Audrey Hepburn?
MB: I haven’t seen the film, but my daughter saw it and she told me that she did scream during the screening.
C&M: What are your favorite films?
MB: Do you mean horror films? Apart from the classics – Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens / Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922) and Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932) – I really like The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961). It scared me a lot. As for “normal” films, I like the movies with Charlie Chaplin. But, above all, I remember All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930), a true masterpiece.
C&M: And what about your own films? What is your favorite?
MB: I have no particular preferences. I like the film I am making now, it has a good story…
C&M: Is there any classic story that you would like to turn into a film?
MB: […] I would like to adapt H. P. Lovecraft for the screen, but his novels are too literary: he is a master in describing beings and things that can’t actually be recreated on screen, so if I made a movie based on Lovecraft it would be a bad one. Some time ago I found a great story for me to turn into a film, The Beckoning Fair One by Oliver Onions. Unfortunately, the story already served as an inspiration for Un tranquillo posto di campagna / A Quiet Place in the Country (Elio Petri, 1968). I must say that the film is quite good.
C&M: We are talking too much about other people. Tell us about yourself. Do you consider yourself a good director?
MB: Well, I can manage: I don’t care about hitting the big time, I care about staying in the business for a long time. My father [Eugenio Bava] always told me that, he was in the movie business since 1906. Maybe I will never become like Michelangelo Antonioni: I absolutely love improvising, adapting to circumstances and creating new scenes in emergency conditions… In my view, a good director shouldn’t be like me: a good director should follow the production plan strictly and to the letter. Then you can make real masterpieces… Cinema is becoming a dangerous profession. I saw too many people ending up badly because they were too intelligent to follow the current trends or because they were too stupid and got carried away by their first, momentary success… Those who have a long-lasting career are the down-to-earth, hardworking guys: maybe they are not great directors, but they have a constant output. Apropos of that, I will tell you about that time I worked with Boris Karloff. He was a great guy, a true English gentleman. He was never late on set, he never behaved like a capricious film star. We made I tre volti della paura / Black Sabbath (1963) together. We all knew that he had arthritis and terrible pains in his legs, but he never complained about his health with us. Maybe he never acted in a movie masterpiece, but he was in the business for almost 40 years.
C&M: So you are pessimistic about your job?
MB: I am a pessimistic… optimist. At worst, I will just have to change movie genre. What matters to me is to last.
cinepugno 