Kill, Baby, Kill () is a 1966 Italian Gothic supernatural horror film directed and co-written by Mario Bava and starring Giacomo Rossi Stuart and Erika Blanc. Written by Bava, Romano Migliorini, and Roberto Natale, the film focuses on a small European village in the early 1900s that is being terrorized by the ghost of a murderous young girl.
Overseen by one-time producers Nando Pisani and Luciano Catenacci of F.U.L. Films, Kill, Baby, Kill was considered to be a small-scale project compared to Bava's earlier films, as it was made without internationally recognized stars or the support of a major distributor. Although a complete script was written by Migliorini and Natale prior to the start of production, Bava claimed that much of the film was improvised. Shot partially on location in Calcata, Faleria and at the Villa Grazioli in 1965, the film underwent a troubled production due to F.U.L. Films running out of money during principal photography, prompting the cast and crew to finish the film in the knowledge that they would not be paid for their work. In post-production, the score had to be compiled from stock music created for earlier film productions.
Although the film's commercial performance during its initial Italian theatrical release was limited, its domestic run outgrossed those of Bava's previous horror films; abroad, it garnered positive notices from Variety and the Monthly Film Bulletin. With the re-evaluation of Bava's filmography, Kill, Baby, Kill has been acclaimed by filmmakers and critics as one of the director's finest achievements; it was placed at number 73 on a Time Out poll of the best horror films.
Plot
In 1907, Dr. Paul Eswai is sent to the Carpathian village of Karmingam to perform an autopsy on Irena Hollander, a woman who died under mysterious circumstances in an abandoned church. Monica Schufftan, a medical student who has recently returned to visit her parents' graves, is assigned as his witness. During the autopsy, they find a silver coin embedded in Hollander's heart.
The local villagers are accustomed to medicinal practices and superstitions Eswai finds preposterous, and claim that Karmingam is haunted by the ghost of a young girl who curses those she visits. After Nadienne, the daughter of local innkeepers, is visited by the girl, a ritual to reverse the curse is performed by Ruth, the village witch. Ruth has been embedding coins in the hearts of the deceased. Karl, the burgomeister, brings Ruth the body of the curse's latest victim. They arrange for a swift burial so that the victim does not become another vengeful ghost. That evening, Eswai goes to meet with a colleague, Inspector Kruger, at the villa of Baroness Graps. When he arrives at the large, decrepit house, the Baroness informs him that she knows of no such Kruger. Upon leaving, Eswai encounters the ghostly young girl.
Meanwhile, Monica has a nightmare about the child, and awakens to find a doll at the foot of her bed. She runs into Eswai in the street, and he offers to take her to the inn so she can sleep. At the inn, Eswai discovers that Nadienne is wearing a leech vine around her body as part of Ruth's treatment. Believing this procedure to be causing her greater suffering, he removes the vine despite her family's concerns. In the local cemetery, Eswai finds two gravediggers burying Kruger's corpse, who has been shot in the head. Simultaneously, Nadienne is awoken by the young girl at her window, who compels her to impale herself with a candelabra.
Eswai and Monica are informed by Karl that the ghostly girl is Melissa Graps, the dead daughter of the Baroness, and that she is responsible for the deaths of Hollander and Kruger; he also reveals to Monica that the Schufftans were not her real parents. When he goes to retrieve evidence proving so, he is compelled by Melissa into destroying the documents and killing himself. Turned away by Nadinne's father due to her death, Monica and Eswai attempt to get the reluctant villagers' attention by ringing the church bell. Inside the church, they find a secret passageway, where Monica experiences déjà vu. They discover the Graps' family tomb, which includes that of Melissa, who died in 1887, aged seven.
They find a staircase leading out of the tomb, which takes them inside the Villa Graps, where the Baroness confronts them in the hallway. She reveals that Melissa was trampled to death while fetching a ball during a drunken festival. Melissa appears in the room, and Monica suddenly vanishes through a doorway. Eswai chases after her through a repeating series of doorways; in his pursuit, he confronts a doppelgänger of himself, after which he is left locked in a room and subsequently spirited out of the villa. He loses consciousness, and awakens in Ruth's home. Ruth explains that the coins found in the hearts of the victims have been placed there by her as talismans to ward off supernatural powers of the Baroness, who has invoked her daughter's ghost to punish the villagers, and that she intends to kill the Baroness to avenge Karl, who was her lover.
In the villa, the Baroness reveals to Monica that she is her daughter, and Melissa her older sister; following Melissa's death, the Baroness' servants, the Schufftans, sent Monica to be raised and educated in Gräfenberg for her protection. Melissa's ghost appears, chases Monica down the staircase into the tomb, and urges her to throw herself from a nearby balcony. Ruth arrives and confronts the Baroness. The Baroness stabs her through the chest with a fire poker, but Ruth manages to strangle her to death before dying, thus laying Melissa's soul to rest; Eswai arrives in time to save Monica. Reunited, the pair leave Villa Graps as the sun rises in the distance.
Cast
Production Background Kill, Baby, Kill marked Mario Bava's return to gothic horror, having previously directed Black Sabbath and The Whip and the Body in 1963. In later years, he claimed to have made the film as a result of a bet with "some Americans"; in contrast to his earlier horror films, it was neither made with American or British leads, nor did it experience creative interference from a major distributor like American International Pictures (AIP). Bava biographer Tim Lucas stated that retrospective reviews of Italian horror films described the period between 1957 and 1966 as the genre's "Golden Age", with Kill, Baby, Kill often being described as its "Grand Finale", as it was among the last of these films from Italy to be widely distributed.
The film was funded by a small Italian company, F.U.L. Film. The film's credited producers were Nando Pisano and Luciano Catenacci; this was the only film they produced. Pisano was a production manager who had worked on films ranging from Roberto Rossellini's Where Is Freedom? to Giorgio Bianchi's The Orderly, while Catenacci worked primarily as an actor under the stage names "Max Lawrence" and "Luciano Lorcas". Catenacci also served as the film's production manager and portrayed the character of Karl. Lucas has estimated that the film's budget to be lower than those of Bava's films that were distributed by AIP in the United States, estimating it to be well below $50,000.
Writing and pre-production The screenplay is credited to the writing team of Romano Migliorini and Roberto Natale, who had previously written two horror films for Massimo Pupillo, Francesco Merli and Ralph Zucker: Bloody Pit of Horror and Terror-Creatures from the Grave. Both films shared crew members and studio space with Kill, Baby, Kill; aside from using some of the earlier films' set furnishings, the set housing the Graps family crypt in Kill, Baby, Kill had been used as the Crimson Executioner's dungeon in Bloody Pit of Horror. Lucas notes that the script has two possible cinematic antecedents: the 1944 Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes film The Scarlet Claw, in which Holmes and Dr. Watson are summoned to a small town where a series of murders — the most recent of which is of a woman who bled to death while ringing the local church bell — have been attributed to a ghost, and 1960's Village of the Damned (based on the 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham), in which a group of aliens resembling blonde children menace a village by psychically compelling residents into committing suicide.
Bava claimed in an interview that the film was improvised on the spot from a script of only 30 pages; Lucas has suggested that the screenplay for the film may have been based on an early screenplay for Lady Morgan's Vengeance by Natale and Migliorini. Film historian Roberto Curti has refuted this, noting that Kill Baby Kills shooting script, titled Le macabre ore della paura (), featured detailed dialogue and a completed storyline. The screenplay stored in Rome's Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia library was deposited there on 5 April 1966, as screenplays are generally deposited there before shooting has started. Curti noted that La vendetta di Lady Morgan began shooting on 26 July 1965, was submitted to the Ministerial Censorship Commission on 1 October, and was released on 16 December. This screenplay also revealed that ideas that had already been used in Bava's previous films but were discarded, such as victims returning from the dead as zombies. The film's screenplay also includes scenes that remain in the film, such as the scene of the spiral staircase and the scene where Dr. Eswai chases his doppelgänger over and over into the same room.
Kill, Baby, Kill marked Bava's fourth and final collaboration with actor Giacomo Rossi Stuart, following The Day the Sky Exploded, Caltiki – The Immortal Monster, and Knives of the Avenger. Actress Erika Blanc was cast as Monica Schuftan in the film, and claimed the film was only the second feature she made, despite filmographies suggesting otherwise. Bava auditioned hundreds of young girls to play the part of Melissa Graps, but was unable to find one. Bava eventually cast Valerio Valeri, who was the son of his concierge. According to Blanc, Valeri was not happy with the role due to the need for him to wear a dress, and that Bava would goad his performance by referring to him as "Valeria". The actress also noted that fellow cast member Fabienne Dali was so committed to her role as the witch Ruth that she performed tarot card readings for the cast and crew.
Filming and special effects
Lucas described the production of Kill, Baby, Kill as being plagued by "bad luck" as the film ran out of money while filming. Blanc stated that the cast and crew were only paid for their first two weeks working on the film, and agreed to complete it without pay due to their affection for Bava. Bava's friend Luigi Cozzi stated that Bava was never paid for his work on the film.
According to Bava, the film was shot in 12 days in 1965. Blanc has refuted this statement, the film was shot in "maybe twenty" days, while Bava's son and assistant director Lamberto stated the film took about four weeks to finish.
Several exterior scenes for Karmingam were filmed on location in the medieval towns of Calcata and Faleria, while the façade and several interiors of Villa Grazioli in Grottaferrata were used to represent Villa Graps. All other sequences, including interiors and the cemetery scenes, were shot at Titanus Appia Studios, where it was one of the last films to be shot there before it predominantly became a distribution company. Lamberto Bava described Calcata during this period as "Abandoned, constructed on a mountain of tufa, a material that has crumbled over the centuries" and that around the late 1960s the area "became a kind of hippie community."