Attack of the Final Girls is a podcast about the horror genre, so listener discretion is advised. Please check the show notes for specific content warnings for this episode. And of course, beware of spoilers. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Attack of the Final Girls. I'm Teresa. And I'm Juliet. And we're here for our first Mario Bava movie. Yeah. How have we gotten this far?
Oh, my God. Not a Mario Bava movie. Not our first Charlo film that we've covered, but it's our first Bava film. And, you know, Bava had such a big catalog, but most people are only going to know A Bay of Blood. Of all of his movies. Or Black Sabbath. Or Black Sabbath. He did a lot of movies that weren't Joll-O films. Correct. And I don't think that a lot of people who live currently...
have seen lots of his movies. Yeah, unless you're like a genre fan or a fan of European cinema. But he's highly influential for other people who have come since him, both Italian. directors, Giallo directors, and Scorsese has said that Bava is one of his influences. Pedro...
I don't see his last name wrong. Almodovar. Yeah, Almodovar. He also has not only used clips from Bava's movies, including the one that we're covering today, which is called Blood and Black Lace from 1964, but he also has cited him as a big influence. So even though maybe not super frequently watched filmmaker now, he has influenced the likes of Fulci. And this is sometimes cited as being one of... The first Jello movies, if not the first Jello movie. Yes.
So it's highly influential. Yeah. It was kind of Jello before Jello was a thing. Like it knew it was a thing. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Because really, as a film genre now, of course. As you may remember from our Red Queen kills seven times episode.
Giallo started as a literary genre first. So it referred to the pulp novels that were coming out in Italy. Giallo comes from the Italian word for yellow because all of these books had a... sort of a uniform like yellow stripe on them as part of the branding of the series and so all
of this style of pulp novel took on that name and then the film genre then borrowed from it because they had a lot of similar themes but actually this film takes influence from a lot of different things and a lot of different cinema traditions which I think is very very cool it's easy to sometimes think about
you know, different countries' film traditions as being very isolated or very of the place. And they certainly are. But, you know, we see American influence. There's a huge German influence on this film, French influence. and even a little Mexican cinematic influence. Yeah, yeah. So the Jalo tradition is... Influenced quite a bit by German creamy movies, which which were basically crime dramas. Sorry, let me clarify West German crime dramas.
And they were generally filmed in black and white, kind of borrowing from that like old school 40s cinematic experience. But they started to be filmed in color. And this movie specifically kind of borrowed. that sort of dramatic like lighting and also that crime theme, like whodunit. And I will say that of the jello genre, this movie is probably one of the most linear.
Yeah. When it comes to like crime, investigation of crime, and then resolution of crime. Yeah, this one and Bird with a Crystal Plumage, which is Argento's 1970 film that borrows from this. They're both kind of considered like the two progenitors of Jallo. They're both the most straightforward of the genre, if you ask me. Yeah, absolutely. That eventually becomes sort of a trope in the genre is that Jallo movies...
can sometimes be very difficult, especially a lot of Argento's later films, like nonlinear. Sometimes what's happening in real life, like sort of to borrow from our Lynch episode a couple times ago, what's happening, what's not. happening, what's a dream, what is literal, what is figurative. This movie does not have those trappings. Everything is happening. Nothing is fake. You're not going to have like a weird drug sequence in this one in particular, although a lot of people are doing it.
There's lots of drug use, but no drug scenes. Yes, exactly. It's interesting in that way. But it is also very of the genre in terms of the cinematography. You have very sharp lighting. You have red stuff everywhere. Oh, yes. So much red. I mean, you can just look at the set dressings and be like, ah, I see why the genre became this thing. Yeah. Lots of gloved hands using tools.
Sometimes the tools in this case are a part of the gloves. Lots of hands in general, like hand shots are very important in this movie. Also, some stuff that you can see that Fulci and Argento later would use sort of... Shots that give the appearance of the supernatural.
but not actually supernatural. Like the scene, I forget what her name is, but when she's surrounded by the mirror, she's wearing like this red and black brocade coat and she's in the mirror, but it makes her look like... ethereal you know like she's floating in space and she's not existing in the room which is really cool but yeah there's lots and lots and lots of stuff that you can tell like okay we see where we got this yeah the um highly decorated
and very like lush and crunchy scenes. Clearly not something where they just... We're like set dressing, like stuff that actually looks lived in and practical. Those sort of like scenes and sequences, very high couture fashion. Literally, this movie is set in a... high couture, like fashion house, which is weird and something that you don't really see a lot anymore. You see it in a lot of European movies of this era, like of the late 60s and early 70s. But it does like as a modern audience.
member it is kind of different because we don't see that as often in modern movies unless we're watching a period piece that is about like the fashion of that era that's one of those like i think cultural fascinations that
I think was more perhaps exotic at the time, you know, more interesting, like, ooh, you know, there's high fashion, but what are the dark edges around high fashion? Whereas now, especially having like... lived through, you know, the 90s and learned about the treatment of models and all of the body issues they're in because of their treatment.
Honestly, I feel like the substance gets at it the closest and the most recently, but it almost feels like maybe we don't use the fashion industry and horror as much because we're just like, well, the real thing is. horrible like you can't make it any more horrible but the substance says although it's not fashion exclusively the whole idea of like
Hollywood and body image and things like that, I think gets the closest to it than a lot of modern movies have gotten. And this movie in particular, I mean, this is 64. So it's before like we're really pushing a lot of boundaries in the early 70s, like late 60s. early 70s and italy of course is light years ahead of where the united states would have been in 1964 because we're recovering you know
Post World War Two, I think Italy was like breaking free of, you know, a fascist dictator. And so they're making leaps and strides. And they're they're also. taking chances that we weren't in the United States. The United States was like family values. Italy was like, forget family values. We're going to make beautiful fashion. Fashion, disco, all the things. Yeah. That like, excuse my terrible Italian accent, but. They were still very conservative, but they were doing things with like.
fabric and color and things like that that we weren't doing at that time. Well, and at that time, too, as the first omen reminds us, there was a big kind of push and pull between traditional Catholic religious society and secular.
society and so the fashion industry could kind of like toggle both of those lines you know it's beauty and it's hedonism you know but you could also have a very refined upper class look so it's a nice like cultural moment i think that's an interesting point that you just made there like straddling the line between like hedonism and like order this movie has a very mad men thing going on oh yeah where you have like this fashion house which obviously is
business and you have like many people smoking and you know like this this sort of order thing that's happening where you have like the designers and the models and Like the rich people who are funneling money into this and the Contessa who's, you know, she's the one who owns the business and all that. So you have that going on, but you have this like very lush, like hedonistic undercurrent that's happening where like people are doing.
doing drugs and this dude's a pill popper and they said he's epileptic. I don't think that he was epileptic. I didn't get that from there. I think that was the pills. Yeah, exactly. It seemed like he had some addiction situations happening and other people in the movie did also have addictions that were going on. And then you have this sort of like central narrative about this girl who has all this dirt on other people within this fashion house up to and including an abortion.
very, very, very, very, very not okay in predominantly Catholic Italy. In fact, this place is very close to Rome. Yep. They mentioned that from the Contessa's house, you can see all of Rome from there. So... yeah like abortion is looking out his window at you right exactly like you could feel the pope's gaze bore into you you know so
Very interesting because like stylistically, it's very like high fashion, very like orderly on the surface. But then like we have this nasty stuff that's happening underneath the surface. And the IMDb summary is a match. It's scandalous because we get the inside track, but like, it's not scandalous. Like we see in other Jallo films.
The scandal like pours over and then people get judged based off of it. This is all very internal. Right. Yeah. It seems very obvious that they don't necessarily want to. create an outside scandal but there's not necessarily a very large threat of that in this movie like as we see in
In later films, it's like, oh, no, the press is beating down our doors. And, you know, they're saying to the inspector, because there's always an inspector, like, you know, you have to solve these murders because this is ruining our reputation. is like well maybe you should stop killing people i don't know but yeah that sort of external threat is not necessarily present in the script as presented. And yet I think we can still kind of feel that just given the type of business that they're in.
Yeah, exactly. There are lots of movies. And I think that this is a really fascinating thing to explore. Like, there's lots of movies where... The murder of a fashion model would cause obviously like police issues, but also like part of the movie ends up being the effects that it has on the city at large. And in this movie, we don't really have that at all. It's all internal.
Like, oh, this model was killed and then she's found in a bureau, you know, or in a wardrobe randomly. That was scary and terrifying. And now other people within this fashion house are also being murdered. And that's scary. But it's scary only to the people that are inside. Right. We don't see how it has an effect on, you know, Rome at large, which is fine. It's just interesting to see like.
Are we getting a micro view or a macro view of what's happening? So in this case, we're laser focused on the people specifically. I think it's Isabella. She's the first one to be killed and her diary is found. And then everybody's like. Like whipping their heads around like, oh, shit, I'm in that diary. She's got dirt on me because apparently Isabella was a giant gossip. Yeah. Yeah. Meticulous note taker. Yeah. And also she carried her. Well.
I was going to say she carried her diary around, but she did hide it pretty well in a jewelry box. I don't know that I would hide that in a public space, but no, no, I definitely would not. I would absolutely be keeping that with me and my purse, but it's a part of the plot that they find it. It is red, by the way. Right.
Yes, it is. It is read. It's a very pretty diary. And everybody is in this diary. You know, she's got dirt on literally everybody. She knows about the abortion that happened. She knows about money that's being loaned. She knows that this guy is flat broke.
And he didn't have the money to lend in the first place, but he did it anyways. And she also knows about some blackmail that's happening. Yeah. Isabella is the prototypical gossip girl. Oh, yeah. She was the first gossip girl. Yeah. But guess what? She died. So she can't be that gossip girl. Oh, yeah. I loved that this movie I could see influences either taken from or given to Hitchcock. Absolutely. Yes. The opening credits are great.
Yeah. They're made to look like they're still framed, but they're not. So they have this kind of like eerie dynamic like feel to them as they're doing the opening credits. But they also do the audience a favor and put. the actor there so you know who it is like in the opening credits. That's very helpful. I wish they did that more in modern movies.
And they're beautiful too. Like the opening credits are very beautiful. And after the opening credits are over, they sort of like open the scene with like the sign of the fashion house, which I think is called Christiane House of Couture. They show that sign. And it felt very like immediately I'm thinking regular picture show. Yeah. And Clue.
Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. Clue took so much from this movie. Absolutely. Absolutely. So it was very cool. Like, and later through the movie, too. But like the opening sequence and the very, very, very first introduction of the couture house was like. okay, this is very Hitchcock. Like, I don't know how much they gave to Hitchcock and how much, you know, they got from Hitchcock, but it felt very, very, very much like 60s Hitchcock. Absolutely. Yeah.
I also read that this movie had a much lower budget than a lot of Bava's other earlier movies, which is interesting to me because I'm like... What was the budget then? Because these houses are wild. Yeah. Like, did Bava just have, like, is this a Sedaris situation where he was like, I just had a lot of rich friends and I was like, hey, can I film in your house? And they were like, sure.
them in my house it's beautiful because holy cow the budget would have had to have been insane if they were like making these sets but I really don't think that they were I think that they were like his friend's houses or maybe his houses. Maybe it's a Charles Band situation where he just films in his beautiful castles. Could be. Could be. Yeah. Everybody in this film lives in like half a museum, half an antiques warehouse kind of a situation.
But it's lit like it's a club in West Germany. Yeah. Yes. Always. Getting ready to have a disco in there. Because like when I forget what her name is, I forget like I can see her image clearly in my mind, but I always forget who they're what their names are. But the woman who gets killed in the antiques warehouse, like there's like flashing pink and blue light.
I'm like, who, what? Who did this? Like, was this done by the killer ahead of time so that it could look very cool? The funny thing to me, so like they said that this movie was very much lower budget than. his other movies so much so that in order to get tracking shots, they put the camera on a child's wagon.
And then just pulled the wagon. So especially in the first sequence where you see the killer kill Isabella, like choke her out in this park or I'm not sure if it was a park or just like a street. But when you see the killer choke Isabella. it out you can tell that the camera is in a wagon because of the perspective yeah we're like knee height to the action that's happening and i'm like oh shit it was a wagon yeah
I was like, that's wild. Like they couldn't even afford a dolly. Yeah. And it's great because it's like one of those things that if you didn't know that you would assume that that was a deliberate stylistic choice on the part of the director. And yet. It was out of necessity. And there are so many things like that, especially with sort of seminal films or films at the start of a subgenre or film movement or something like that, that become these like hallmarks of... the genre or the style.
That were really just done out of like sheer necessity for the filmmaking. And I kind of love that. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Like, it's always so much fun when something happens accidentally. That's like, oh, what a choice. And then they're like, oh, we'll just. literally didn't have any money yeah we didn't have anything else we could do it's like there are movies and I
Like, I don't remember any of them off the top of my head. So sorry, guys. But filmmakers who have to put their camera on a bicycle in order to follow like cars and traffic in order to get those shots. It's not always great. It's not always perfect.
especially in this case like the angle thing ended up being totally like a sign of the genre yes like strange angles from like unnatural areas or unnatural looks or what have you in this case I thought it was hysterical because as soon as I'm reading that I'm watching this you know and she's walking down the street and then she's getting choked and I'm like
Oh, yeah, that is absolutely from a wagon. But cool. I mean, cool for them. And like, you can still see those sort of dramatic angles in movies now. So yeah. It did a thing. So God bless Bava's little radio flyer or whatever that's called. Also, we have other, you know, hallmarks of Giallo movies and Italian films in general, but mostly Giallo movies. You have the wonderful red trench coat. Oh, yes. The trench coat in general, the killer wears a black one, but there's a red trench coat as well.
strangling or asphyxiation in other methods, such as with a pillow. There's a lot of like very brutal strangling, though, that happens in this movie. The masked killer, of course, as Juliet mentioned earlier. hands, seeing hands doing things, close-ups of that. All signs of a Jalo film. There's literally, this movie is dripping in red. Like, if you are in a scene and you don't see something... precariously placed that is read, then...
I don't know what to tell you. Yeah. It's there, I promise. Oh, yeah. The mass killer thing is really interesting, actually, because that influence came from Mexico. Oh, cool. The look of the killer is very similar. to the killer in The Man Without a Face, El Hombre Sin Rostro. directed by Juan Bustillo Oro in 1950. So that look was sort of mimicking the central character in that film and translated over to Baba's film and then became...
again, like was interpreted upon and became, you know, another Jallo hallmark having that masked killer. And so I think that's really cool that we have influences as close as France and Germany and as far as Mexico and America. You can absolutely see that this movie is just dripping with influence from other places. And that Bava was a very meticulous and careful consumer of other countries and other.
In terms of his influence, because even though this movie is like the first quote unquote Jollow film, he was not by any. you know, stretch of the imagination, a novice in terms of being a director or writer at this point. He, you know, is very accomplished and had many, many, many big budget films, especially in Italy, but they were.
all of sort of other types of genres, like Westerns, of course, you know, spaghetti Westerns. It's very funny to me that this movie is like very firmly planted as like, okay, initial Jolla film. absolutely it sort of had everything going against it which i kind of wanted to talk about like This movie was a huge financial disappointment, even though it was one of his smallest budgets. This movie was such an incredible disappointment. It didn't even break the top 100 highest top 100 highest.
grossing movies in italy yeah which is wild yeah i mean italy is a huge powerhouse when it comes to making movies but he didn't even break the top 100 in italy let alone anywhere else. So huge disappointment. It was barely reviewed. Nobody was talking about this maybe when it came out. And it's kind of like, oh, maybe that took the wind out of his sails a little bit. Maybe. It is interesting to see how with...
So many movies. I was having a conversation with a colleague just yesterday, in fact, about like the concept of a cult classic. And like, when does a cult classic transcend the cult? You know, where you have these movies, like Rocky Horror is a great example. where...
It started as a cult classic and now it is firmly ensconced in like popular culture writ large to the point where I don't even know if you can call it a cult classic because everybody knows Rocky Horror Picture Show at this point. But I think this movie is... of a twist on that example which is like when you look back there are so many seminal films especially in horror that did horribly at the box office that were considered like complete and utter box office failures
but then went on to kind of retroactively found and influence a whole movement of film. And I think this is such a great example of that. And sometimes that takes a long time. I mean, in this case, it took... you know, about six years for people to start kind of retroactively recognizing it and for it to then be kind of...
referenced cinematically in other films, the films of the 70s. But I think that's such an interesting trend and such an interesting thing that we see over and over again is these movies that just absolutely fly. that, you know, by all accounts should have been forgotten because nobody saw them, nobody reviewed them, nobody liked them. But then they go on to be this like progenitor of this whole other thing that becomes very celebrated.
Yeah. And lest we forget, Mario Bava's kid is Lumberto Bava. Exactly. Like, you know, a guy who went on to make Cannibal Holocaust and Demons, you know, a... extremely popular very firmly solidly horror director who his dad was making these you know way before he ever came along and then he came on to you know not only influence all of these other movies, but also influence the sun into making...
I mean, I wouldn't call all of Lumberto Bava's movies Jollop films, but I would definitely say that they borrow heavily from the influence. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I think they, well, they're not all pure Jollop. they definitely, yeah, have their roots in that, you know. Yeah, like Tenebrae. Yeah, yeah, they're part of their DNA.
Yeah. Mario Bava did not pass away until 1980. And he was still active up until then. But this was one of his like last, you know, great films, I would say, where he was really, really, really going for it. Maybe he was just like, I'm tired. to retire yeah because I'm
you know, older and I want to enjoy my remaining years and like totally fair. It's funny. I think we have this like strange, maybe it's just Americans, but we have this strange idea that actors, because they have in the past, are going to work up until their very last. you know, very last breath rather than being like, oh, let me respect the fact that this person needs to retire and wants to rest. Yeah, I think that that.
I could go so many ways with this. Like, on the one hand, I think that that is unfortunately symptomatic of American culture where we're just all doomed to work ourselves to death. And so we expect that of... Everyone, including our celebrities. I think it's also that we expect too much of the people that entertain us. You know, I see that in music, too, where, you know. these older bands it's it's seen as somehow like a failure when a band says like hey
we're too old for this. Like, we don't want to tour anymore. Like, it's not just like, oh, hey, let's celebrate what they've given us. Like, we always want more out of our entertainers. Like, that's why we had a, oh, God. I'm about to get on a rant. So we had a fucking new Beatles song that won a fucking Grammy. Oh my God. I know. I'm so mad about that. Still. I hate AI.
That's all I'll say about that. Well, and I mean, Black Sabbath, including Ozzy Osbourne and Tommy Iommi, are coming back for a one last performance in London this year. And I'm like, but why, though? Yeah. Like, bless you. And like Ozzy Osbourne can't walk at this point. He's going to be sitting during this performance. It's like, who are you doing it for though?
Well, and it's also like, again, like not to get on a whole rant because I could talk for hours about this. We talk about this at work all the time. Like this whole phenomenon of like touring tribute bands now. Like, because we just, we always want more. We can't settle on something being like...
A moment in time and being grateful that we have like recorded music. We're like, no, I have to have some too. Right. Again, I could go off on a whole thing about that and how it's harming independent music. But the long and short of it is I think that. American consumers, especially.
We just have this attitude with the people that are entertaining us or the people that are making art for us that like we are owed something. And so they ought to keep working until they drop. And I just think that's not fair. Like we can just. You know, any person ought to be entitled to like work their working life and be satisfied with their career and retire and rest and go like live their lives. Obviously, economics prevent most of us from ever being able to do that. But, you know.
If you can, like you ought to. Yeah. Like retire and then go do like your weird little thing that becomes puzzles or something. Right. Like go like learn how to play croquet or like whatever. Yeah. I mean. like the late gene hackman he had retired yeah he had completely and granted like gene hackman had a fucking stellar career like he worked for many years and absolutely deserved his retirement jack nicholson
Right. You know, he stopped acting and like, God bless him, because now he's just like a fixture at Lakers games. Right. He really loves the Lakers. And that's just living his life. And that's this little weird thing, you know, and he like he's owed that. I mean, he's been. for oh my god you know 60 years at this point so like go on with your bad self do whatever it is that you want to do but
There's also people like, I'll reference him again and second time in this episode, Scorsese. I mean, the dude is... At least 150 years old. And he's still making movies. And people are still paying to go watch and see these movies. I like some of Martin Scorsese's movies. I just think that they're...
Very formulaic. That's my opinion. I know that lots of people are going to come at me for that, and that's okay. I like his documentary work better than his fiction work. You know what? That's valid. But he's still acting, or he's still making movies. Pacino. Yeah. I mean, I mean, if people want to, like, whatever. But I also and this is like not to say that celebrities should receive special treatment. But like, if we are to.
I'm like on my soapbox today. If we're to create an expectation that people ought to be able to work... their jobs and then retire and live the latter half of their lives comfortably and taken care of like people who do any job then we need to have that expectation of our celebrities because often like they are the most visible people in our society. So let's have that expectation for them so that we can then demand that expectation for ourselves. Yeah. And I'm all about...
Actors and actresses who go on who who do like their commercial shit for, you know, 30 to 40 years. And then decide that they're only going to do like weird art house movies. Hell yeah. It's so cool. That's what you want to do. Yeah. And like, don't take themselves too seriously. Aren't too like upset about bad press or whatever. Like I'm about that too. That is.
one thing that's very interesting to me about cinema now is I feel like we're portraying aging actors in a much more sympathetic light like we're saying oh let's make movies actually about what aging is like and that's cool but those movies but those movies don't tend to be like blockbusters that's not like a captain america movie right that's like a movie that we see in an art house yeah like it is nice to see
roles for older actors that aren't like the quirky grandma or whatever in a family film you know especially older women like I think we still have work to do on that but like you know the recent success of like demi moore and pam anderson is like so exciting yeah oh yeah jamie lee curtis out there doing the work and like supporting other actors especially like of her peer age group like awesome love it like let's have more of that but it should always be somebody's choice sure and this movie
We should say is the opposite of that, because it's like almost specifically entirely only very attractive young women. Very, you know, thin, like gender normative, beautiful because they're models, you know, and it was. 1964. So they're all white. They're all conventionally. beautiful people yeah we weren't there yet yeah we weren't we weren't breaking boundaries in terms of you know uh visual but i do want to talk about strangulation in this movie because one of the things that you
Go ahead and say what you said at the very beginning of the movie about strangulation. Oh, yeah. We did a lot with Hitchcock when I was in film school. I had a professor who had done a lot of writing about Hitchcock. So we spent a lot of time on his work and work that influenced. and was influenced by him. And one of the things that that particular professor said is that strangulation is the most sexual form of cinematic murder.
And I think that's a really interesting thing to consider. As you rightly pointed out, other people will say that it is stabbing because of the penetrative nature. But there is something very... intimate when we see it, especially in the cinema of like the 60s and 70s. There's an intimacy to that act that does sort of connotate a sexual experience. I was thinking too, because in this movie, there are
some pretty intense strangulation scenes. So I want to come back to the fact that they keep talking about the killer as a sex maniac here in just a minute. But in this particular case, we don't ever see a sexual motivation past the strangulation. Strangulation is a favored mode of... murder when it comes to serial sexually motivated murders. In the case of a man, which serial killers and serial murderers...
are more predisposed to be white men, cis white men. So in the case of a cis white man murderer, they often will... strangle their victims who are normally cis white women so it does like in terms of um kind of imitating real life it is preferred mode of execution. So if the motivation is sexual, then obviously they're going to be predominantly strangling. So we see that in this movie.
And I was thinking about other movies that feature strangulation and sort of the Venn diagram of how they interact. And one of the more recent movies that I was thinking of is Promising Young Woman. Yes. Which, spoiler alert ahead if you haven't seen it, but... Woof. Yeah. The main character in the movie who is looking for the revenge over the sexual assault and then later suicide of her best friend ends up putting herself in a vulnerable situation on purpose and is strangled.
to death. And it is after a sort of a situation where the strangler thinks that he's going to have sex with this person. And then when she sort of like shows her cards, he ends up strangling her. And it's a very rough scene to watch. It's very intimate.
It is very long and drawn out because if you don't know this, it takes a long time to strangle someone. So I was thinking about that one in correlation to this movie. And then another very different movie, No Country for Old Men, which has a extreme.
brutal strangulation scene. But in contrast to both this movie and Promising Young Woman is very, very, very not sexual. In fact, it is almost bloodless in that Anton, the character who's performing the strangulation, just appears like he does not care at all. Mm hmm. So just an interesting juxtaposition to use strangulation in a movie and to think, OK, this one is very sexual, you know, in Promising Young Woman in Blood and Black Lace were assumed.
like over the course of the movie we think oh this is a sexual strangulation because very very very often in the movie the inspector says it's a sex maniac yeah but then later we come to understand that it is actually not sexually motivated, at least as far as we know. It's more just like trying to make it look like that. So it's just interesting, like how we can use this like very intimate, very brutal form of killing.
in a movie in so many different ways. The discussion that we were having in film school about it actually related to Hitchcock's second to last movie Frenzy, which is... A very complicated Hitchcock movie in a lot of regards. Some people will peg it as his most misogynist movie. I could go either way on that. I think there's a lot of misogyny in a lot of his movies. But there is a killer who strangles women with a necktie in that movie. And it is very...
It is very in line with what is suspected in this movie. Hitchcock actually goes for it and it is very tied up in sex and sexuality and a warped vision of sexuality and misogyny. But I do think it's... interesting too that in this era we saw a lot of movies with strangulation as a method of killing and on the one hand maybe you could chalk that up to budget it's a way to pull off
killing very cheaply. You know, you don't have to have an effects team or fake blood. You just have to shoot the action well to get the point across. But on the other hand, I wonder if that is yet again reflecting like... changing norms in society, about sexuality, about...
women's sexuality and sexual liberation that was beginning you know we were beginning to see that post-World War II and certainly in the late 60s and early 70s exploded both in the United States and in Europe so it's it's just a very interesting choice. And another thing I was reading is that there are really high rates of domestic violence that involve strangulation, not to death, but it's a, you know...
Although it can cause bruising, it's a form of control, you know, and it's very violent control. And it's also very, very scary. That's a very scary way to, you know.
show control over another person. So I think that that was a very common form of domestic violence at the time, especially in a time like 1964, where domestic violence wasn't considered to be as much of an... issue it was more like a resolve amongst yourselves yeah issue resolve within the family versus like oh we need to involve the police right So it's interesting that that, you know, is a theme that we see a lot because it was probably happening a lot.
Definitely. That is a rough part of the movie. And it's not the only way that people are killed in this movie. Like one woman is burned to death. One woman is smothered with a pillow. One woman is made to have an accident where she falls off of a house and then she dies from her injuries.
or we assume that she dies from her injury. So there's many different ways, but that is a very brutal moment within this movie, which I was surprised by because it's 1964. So what the heck? But I do want to say that I think it was so funny that the inspectors were like, They're sex maniacs. I'm assuming that they thought that because they're all models. Yeah. In the modeling. Beautiful women. Yeah. I'm assuming that's why they think that the killer is a sex maniac.
Because otherwise, there is no indication that these are sexual. Right. You know, like... there are many different other ways where we could be like okay this was a sex crime but like it's not that yeah like oh well obviously they're killing young beautiful women they obviously there must be something sexual about it like and and in this case there's not yeah there's really not
Later Jolla movies do have sex maniacs. It just does not seem like these have a tendency to be... Later when we find out the actual killer is the Contessa and her new... secret husband yeah um yeah mazimo when we find that out it's like oh it's not like they easily could have made that a part of this movie. It's like, oh, well, they get sexual gratification from killing the beautiful models. No.
It's just because they're getting blackmailed. Yeah. I wonder if it was a little too early. Like 1964 might have been a little too early to like fully go there. They're like, we can throw around the term, but like, don't. Don't actually do it. Don't do that. Yeah.
So when I'm watching this movie, you know, I'm like experiencing it. I'm having a great time. I'm not thinking super deep about it, though, until I was reading. So Slant did back in 2019, they did like the top 100 horror movies of all time. And they said that this is one of them. They said Blood and Black Lace is one of the top hundred. So I'm going to read a quote by Chuck Bowen, who wrote the entry for Blood and Black Lace.
Mario Bava's mixing of emotionally motivated color and object-centric tactility set the visceral template for the Jalo. Thematically, Blood and Black Lace offers the Jalo an irresolvable obsession with female violation that's simultaneously cruel and heartfelt.
Here the murders are understood to reflect a debasement that suggests a furthering of the debasement of modeling, a suggestion that's literalized by the killer's placement of the bodies in hideous poses and by a purposefully fake substitution of a dummy.
an actress in a drowning scene. This thematic is complicated further by the identity of the killer who reflects the fashion industry's self-loathing and self-consumption driven by a mixture of profound self-interest and neurosis that would be enormously
influential to the subgenre at large in a jalo a woman's worst enemy is often a woman driven to shirk the chains of status quo that shackle her so like okay you know i'm just going along for the ride not noticing these things and i was like okay actually this is like a pretty astute analysis of this movie to like go back to the way that the bodies are placed sort of in these grotesque positions and that
The fashion industry hates itself. Yeah. You know, and it loathes itself and it encourages that self-loathing so much that the woman central to this film, although. He kind of refers to her like a woman's worst enemy as a woman trying to shirk the status quo. She wasn't the primary killer. She did end up having to be a killer. Right. The Countess did.
But Massimo was the one who was doing the majority of the killing. She only did that so that he would have an alibi when he went to the police station. But... She ends up being her own worst enemy because she does this for him and then he still dispenses with her at the end of the movie. And I was like, oh shit, that's a pretty interesting way to conclude that movie. Yeah, it is. I wonder what audiences would have thought of that at the time. Because I, you know, sitting here in the year 2025.
watch a movie as as a femme person watch a movie where a woman you know betrays other women and kills other women in service to her relationship with a man and hoping and thinking that she will somehow like gain power that he's just really taking for himself and i'm like yeah yep Yeah. We watch that play out in our world literally every day. But I wonder...
Yeah, I do wonder what audiences in 1964 and thereafter would have thought about that and if they would have picked up on that nuance or if that's something that we're only able to see now because we... Are slowly but surely some of us as a society being taught to be more aware of those things. Yeah.
You know, like I said, I was just kind of going along for the ride. I like to have movies happen to me, you know? So I wasn't thinking too critically about it. And then I read that quote and I was like, wow, that's actually pretty insightful. I just really like that. And I'm glad.
that First of all, I'm really glad that this movie made the top 100 because to think that it was a super critical failure at the time and now it's considered at least by one set of standards in the top 100 horror movies is like, wow, way to go. real underdog story there yep and to see that it's so influential in so many other movies is really cool yeah
Speaking of movies that happened to you, up next, we're going to watch another one of my like Shudder finds, another one of my rare I have time to watch a movie. So I'm going to watch, you know, something that I haven't seen yet. It definitely happened to me and I was intrigued by it and was like, okay, we got to do this for the podcast. Next time we are going to cover a 2018 Swedish film called Black Circle. It is about a cursed maybe.
Cursed Record. It is about doppelgangers and doubles and other planes of existence. And it reminds me a little bit of the films of Argentina.
director damien rugna who did where evil lurks and terrified hell yeah uh there's there's a little bit of a spiritual sibling in those a little bit uh but it's also its own very very weird thing and I'm really excited to hear what you think about it I'm excited I've never I've seen like the you know I've seen it on Shudder but I've never watched it so I'm really excited to watch this one too
Thanks for listening to attack of the final girls. Find us online at attack of the final girls.com and hear bonus episodes at patrion.com slash attack of the final girls. We're Attack of the Final Girls on Instagram and TikTok. Our theme music is by House Ghost and is available on Rad Girlfriend Records. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcasting app so you don't miss an episode and rate and review on Apple Podcasts so more. I'm Juliet. And I'm Teresa. Until next time, stay scary.