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| Courtesy of Arrow Films |
Billed in America as a sequel to the 1974 film Beyond the Door despite being completely unrelated, Shock is curious for being
one of the few Bava productions that isn’t awash with neon lit lights and
colors or his trademark dynamic camerawork.
Reportedly shot and released quickly with Lamberto Bava in tow ensuring
everything kept to plan, the film is at once the least polished and showy of
the Italian horror master’s oeuvre while also being the most starkly terrifying
also. What it lacks in hyperkinetic
colors overwhelming the viewers senses it makes up for by being genuinely disturbing
and being among the director’s more understated works.
Dora (Daria Nicolodi) and her new hubby Bruno (John Steiner)
have just moved into her old family home with her son Marco (David Colin Jr.)
from her previous marriage to a drug addicted criminal she has long since tried
to put behind her. Upon settling in,
however, the boy ala Regan in The Exorcist starts doing and saying
increasingly peculiar things with hints of incestuous Oedipal yearnings and nightmarish
visions of a flying boxcutter begin filling Dora’s dreams. Whatever traces of her past life she tried to
jettison slowly come back to haunt her in what appears to be either her own
deteriorating mental health or a genuine case of demonic possession of her son
by her dead druggie ex.
The first thing that Bava disciples will notice is how plain
looking this one is comparatively. While
boasting great set pieces including a sculpture of pinched fingers
characteristic of Italian luxuriousness on full cinematic display, Shock is
decidedly reserved in the surreal lighting and camerawork. But that’s not to say it doesn’t have
unexpected moments on inspiration unique to it, such as a confounding technical
sequence where Dario Nicolodi turns over in her bed and the camera moves in
such a way that she is fixed to the bed but her hair moves around in every
direction defying the laws of gravity.
Shot by Mario himself and Alberto Spagnoli with occasional
co-direction (when granted) by Lamberto, the film is a mostly handheld venture
with a lot of zooming and whip pans or shaking of the camera. Where Bava is mostly known for producing
unnatural kaleidoscopic visuals onscreen, the plainness of the cinematography
here will come as a bit of a shock (no pun intended) but nevertheless succeeds
in staging a few visual scares that are every bit as frightening as that one
final scare concluding Brian De Palma’s Carrie. Musically the progressive rock sounding score
by Libra is a bit at odds with the material onscreen but Bava makes it work
with the freneticism of the narrative and shaky nerved up perspective of the film’s
‘heroine’. Tragically this proved to be
Libra’s final recording before disbanding in the same year following the film.
Co-starring Ivan Rassimov as a child psychologist who seems
to think Dora might have more to do with her son’s strange behavior than she
(or we) realizes, the film is largely a psychological and supernatural game
between Daria Nicolodi and her little boy who feels like a curly haired blonde
Damien from The Omen. Nicolodi
carries the film almost entirely by herself as well as having awkward scenes to
play off of child actor David Colin Jr. including a particularly disturbing
scene where it is implied her boy is trying to dry hump her. Tasked with a lot of screaming, running about
and channeling a Rosemary’s Baby sense of defeat through the eyes of a
woman seeing her world coming apart, Nicolodi gives this Bava piece her all if
not cementing it as one of the top female performances in Bava’s canon, period.
Shock was filmed in June
1977 before being quickly cut and released in August that same summer, making
this among the fastest shot and edited films Bava has ever done. Incidentally the film featured Beyond the
Door actor David Colin Jr. onscreen leading to Shock being rebilled
as Beyond the Door II. While neither
really fulfilling the wacky aims of Ovidio G. Assonitis’ Beyond the Door nor
soaring past some of the kinetic visual heights of Mario Bava’s own preexisting
works, Shock nevertheless is a good solid final bow from the great Italian
horror director.
Whether or not the film
was the result of Mario’s own interests or if it came from much nudging and
shoving from his go-getter son is open to debate, but what’s not is that this
could in fact be the grandmaster of European horror’s scariest work of all. Sadly the director would pass on three years after the film's release of a heart attack but thanks to the ongoing efforts of Arrow Video to unearth and clean up his largely neglected works, his legacy is alive and well.
--Andrew Kotwicki
