In Mario Bava’s 1966 horror classic, Kill, Baby, Kill, there have been some mysterious deaths in a small village, the isolation and pure strangeness of which reminds me of the town from The Wicker Man. Evidently a seven year old girl burned to death 20 years earlier and continues to haunt the town. Anybody that she reveals herself to almost immediately dies a terrible death which will look like suicide to any subsequent investigation. As was also the case in The Wicker Man, the outside detective assigned to the case gradually questions his certainty that it’s all just some kind of superstitious hysteria.

He initially explains the phenomena as poverty and ignorance, combined with superstition. A dangerous combination, to be sure. Bava takes this premise and does all kinds of cinematic trickery with it, much more than is common in horror. He makes psychological use of lighting and color, expertly frames his shots within outstanding sets (seriously, even the bad ones are good), and delivers the surprisingly complex story with a level of skill rarely seen in the genre. He makes good use of the quick zoom lens and such ever-effective horror film tools as children and hallways (Kubrick was surely influenced by this film when he made The Shining, we have the ghost of a little girl, the creepy hallways, even the ghostly bouncing ball) and does some great things with a spiral staircase.

I expected the movie to be terrible, at least because of the collection in which it is contained, although I guess I should be careful about assuming that a 10-movie horror collection that comes out to $1.50 per movie will be full of bad ones. One of my other collections has the original House on Haunted Hill and Night of the Living Dead, for example, but I didn’t expect many more that would be any good. Kill, Baby, Kill, though, is certainly an overlooked gem