Mario Bava’s undervalued final film, Shock, stretches the gap between lurid material and sophistication of execution to its breaking point. The overheated premise mixes devastating tragedy with psychosexual nastiness: A mother, Dora (Daria Nicolodi), has lost her heroin-addled husband, Carlo (Nicola Salerno), to an alleged suicide. Upon starting a new life with a suave airline pilot, Bruno (John Steiner), she finds herself bedeviled by the spirit of her former partner, who’s channeling his erotically tinged revenge through their seven-year-old boy, Marco (David Colin Jr.), seeking murder with a side of sex.
Many directors may have deemed this material unfit for dramatization, shying away from its deranged implications. Bava, in collaboration with his son Lamberto in an uncredited role as co-director, goes all in and gets his hands dirty, turning in a go-for-broke performance of serpentine camera moves and clashing tones. It’s maximalist exercise that doubles as a demonstration in how to get the most out of a single location.
The house at the center of Shock is a two-story countryside chateau with a classically spooky basement. Nearly all of its chic decorative furnishings and embellishments—from the grand piano boobytrapped with a razor blade to the pully-operated window coverings that close with the force of a guillotine—play a role in the harassment enacted on Dora by her possessed son. Especially significant is the oversized ceramic hand sculpture that, after inexplicably appearing to Dora beneath a couch cushion in the first few minutes of the film, finds its way onto a centrally located glass shelving unit. Later, the suppressed psychological reasoning behind Dora’s design judgment will make itself known, but until that reveal, the hand functions as a pure surrealist object that commands the attention of both Dora and Bava’s camera, taunting with its stillness but occasionally taking on a life of its own.
The pinched-finger pose of this novelty item evokes that of a puppeteer, a three-fold symbol that encompasses Marco in his role as Carlo’s medium, Carlo as the diabolical string-puller from beyond the grave, and Bava himself, the veteran director unable to disentangle the suffering brought upon his characters from his own audiovisual manipulation. That’s not to say that Shock is a solemn autocritique of filmmaking omnipotence. When Dora, referring to the traumas of her recent past, portentously remarks to Bruno, “I feel sure that’s all behind us now,” one senses the lip-smacking glee of a filmmaker eager to prove her wrong.
The film’s early suggestions of domestic harmony are comically overwrought, what with the jangly acoustic guitars on the soundtrack and sunlit effervescence of the cinematography. Bava, though, wastes no time puncturing that false idyll, littering the mise-en-scène with splashes of red that are harbingers of bloodshed to come and utilizing jarring mood shifts—the film has no less than four tonally distinct musical themes, all interpolated in different ways throughout by prog-rock group Libra—to keep viewers as off balance as his unstable heroine.
Shock’s defining attribute is this campaign of agitation, which is felt everywhere from the aggressive editing maneuvers (one superb transition overlaps a whip pan across the living room with the screech of an airplane taking off) to the dynamic central performances, which vacillate between composure and shrillness. Whether or not it can be deemed skillful in its execution, Colin Jr.’s performance is especially effective, selling as he does Marco’s demonic possession by regularly turning on a dime from cheery obnoxiousness to freaky stillness; you can almost sense Bava just off camera indicating when to flick the switch.
Nicolodi, in a fiercely committed performance, orchestrates a more gradual unraveling, but point A and point B are no less radically divergent. Dora’s evolution from doting housewife to hysterically shrieking victim is par for the genre course, but the seemingly perfunctory trajectory is spiked along the way with expressions of shame, guilt, erotic reverie, and dazed torpor, as well as a blood-curdling scream to rival that of Laura Palmer. (It’s easy to imagine David Lynch being inspired by this percussive death rattle, along with Shock’s leering POV shots of a dozing Dora, when he made Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me).
Shock’s emblematic image is a close-up of the coiled rope on the red tree swing that Marco plays with—a familiar Bava motif that acts as a medium for Carlo’s violence. This is a film of tightly wound tension spinning inexorably toward a release, in this case a molasses-like flow of hallucinatory imagery: a memory sequence shot with filters that stretch the image like taffy; a long close-up of Dora staring her demon in the face while a midnight wind thrashes her hair around in slow-motion; and, most scarring of all, a rat climbing up Dora’s blouse to violate her in a moment that brings the inherent sleaziness of the premise to a startling apex.
There’s no shortage of such cruelties piled on Dora throughout Shock’s running time, but in identifying Carlo and Bruno as co-conspirators in her breakdown—the former through supernatural torture, the latter through gaslighting—the film is less a case of targeted misogyny than an indictment of the stranglehold placed on women by men with delusional expectations. In the metaphorical closing scene, which suggests a warped, pitiless father-son reunion, that hammer is brought down with resounding definitiveness.
Image/Sound
Let’s start with a fringe benefit of this new Arrow Video disc: Unless you’re a keen scavenger of vintage record stores with heaping Italian prog-rock sections, you’re unlikely to hear remastered work by the band Libra anywhere else. Active in the mid ’70s, this rotating group of avant-gardists had associations with the more longstanding Goblin, Dario Argento’s go-to group for soundtracks, and their sonically diverse, rhythmically challenging accompaniments for Shock point to a style that was perhaps too unwieldy to have generated a sustained film scoring operation. Nonetheless, Shock’s music is one of its most instantly recognizable qualities, and it sounds clear and hi-fi on this new Blu-ray, finely balanced alongside the screeching auditory landscape so prevalent throughout the film.
You’re also probably not likely to see Shock anywhere else in such vibrant clarity given the relative scarcity of 35mm screenings and the lack of any restorationists rushing to give it the DCP treatment. The color rendition here is extraordinary, which is apt given Mario Bava’s abiding faith in chromatic symbolism and the pure psychological impact of a saturated red object. Tonal separation is also pleasingly executed; for a horror film, there’s a notable lack of indistinguishable black negative space and a marked abundance of glowing sunlight.
Extras
It’s weird to complain about a distributor providing too much supplemental material for a home-video release, especially when it comes to a film that’s more than deserving of the attention after languishing in relative obscurity. But there are times when the three-plus cumulative hours of extras—more than twice the duration of the film—get a bit repetitive. That begins with a thoroughly analytical and factual commentary track by Mario Bava biographer Tim Lucas, certain observations and accounts of which are echoed elsewhere by writer Stephen Thrower, Shock co-director Lamberto Bava, and co-writer Dardano Sacchetti.
Each are given ample time to pontificate on the merits of the film in newly recorded interview segments, and there are of course unique insights and anecdotes, like Lamberto Bava’s claim that the film originated around his idea of making a suspense film entirely built around objects, or Thrower’s discussion of the delicate push-pull between modernity and the past in Mario Bava’s filmography. But there’s also a great deal of moony rambling and discursive reminiscing, and as such tighter edits might have helped.
More concise and original is Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’s video essay The Devil Pulls the Strings, for its look at the symbolically charged use of props throughout the film and detailed analysis of the puppeteer hand and its possible allusions to Italian art history. Critic Alberto Farina provides another stimulating short vignette about a piece of film-adjacent artwork created by Mario Bava for Daria Nicolodi after the film’s production—one that hints at the mutual affections of their working relationship.
And there’s much more: a lengthy essay by Troy Howarth that lucidly condenses much of what’s discussed in the video segments; contemporaneous marketing trailers for the film, both from Italy and America, where the film was puzzlingly marketed as a sequel to 1974’s Beyond the Door; and an image gallery of Japanese and Italian print materials associated with the film, most of which underline what a shame it is that Arrow opted for a generic digital collage for its cover design over the bold hand-painted style applied to the original posters.
Overall
Arrow’s release of Mario Bava’s final feature doesn’t always feel conscientiously curated, but it’s hard to complain when an underappreciated work gets such a robust treatment.
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