First Scare: Kill, Baby, Kill

Mario Bava's gothic classic is a masterclass in designing and executing absolutely top-shelf spooky vibes

Italian horror is hit or miss with me. I know it's essential to the genre, but the '70s stuff—even Suspiria—just doesn't do it for me. But then in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Lydia Deetz's daughter, Astrid, states that Kill, Baby, Kill is her favorite horror movie. Of course, this is just Tim Burton spreading the gospel of his favorite filmmakers (which is awesome; the youth need to expand their spooky horizons).

But I took it as a sign to head back to Italy for some frights. Kill, Baby, Kill centers on a small town in the Carpathian mountains that is experiencing a rash of unexplained deaths. A doctor is sent to investigate the goings-on, and accompanied by a local medical student, tries to debunk what he fervently believes is just small-town superstition. The townsfolk, on the other hand, are sure that the spirit of a dead girl named Melissa is spurring people to kill themselves.

The plot isn't exactly groundbreaking, but in 1966 the "evil children" genre wasn't in full force quite yet, so it may have been more exciting back then.

What Kill, Baby, Kill does do well is absolutely immaculate production design and overall feeling. It has the vibe of Hammer horror films combined with the strangely formal feeling of a theatrical play.

Nearly every scene could be a frame-worthy spooky still. If you're looking for long, dark shadows that fall down staircases, grubby gravediggers in fog-laden cemeteries, and cobwebs encircling archaic sconces, this film's got you covered in spades. It could almost be one of the "Spooky Ambience — 10 Hour" channels you find on YouTube and leave on the TV during a Halloween party.

The version I found was dubbed in English, which makes it a little harder to evoke as much as spook, but one thing I really liked was the amount of female characters in this—from the local town witch, Ruth (who, oh my God, would Aubrey Plaza play the hell out of in a modern remake) to the hauntingly white spirit of 7-year-old Melissa, the ghost at the center of it all. It's also cool how Bava turns traditional color symbology on its head, using white for evil and black for the force of good.

Overall, not scary but fun to vibe to on a cool, dark fall night. Bonus points for the haunted dolls scattered throughout.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

LET'S FRIGHTEN CHILDREN! Vincent Price & Scooby-Doo

You’re a parent. You love horror. But horror is scary. So how to share this love of horror with your young, innocent, in-love-with-the-world child?

Sure, you can Google “best horror movies for kids,” and get the usual results, which you kinda already knew anyway. But for myself, as a parent who has tackled this question four times over, I’d like to take a deeper dive into this idea. So today I’m introducing our “Let’s Frighten Children!” series, which I hope will at least prompt some discussion about how we grown-up nerds can indoctrinate our tiny replicas into the genre we love, without sending them, screaming, into therapy.

Over the years, I have documented on this site the way I came to love horror, which was through screenings of classic Universal monster movies on over-the-air TV back in the 1980s. But the world has moved on. No 21st-century kid is getting their creepy from UHF channels, so how do we, as loving, responsible parents who know the joys of floating skeletons and disembodied laughter, bring our little kids with us into the warm embrace of darkness?

Friends, I have ideas.

The Language of Horror

For me and my family, the first step to introducing horror was to introduce the language of scares without, really, the fear. It’s hard to be a little kid. You are tiny, and surrounded by giants. Nothing makes sense, and every outcome is uncertain. Mom’s leaving...Will she come back?! How long is an hour?! It’s unknowable. And worse, there might actually be a monster under the bed. Or in the closet — you just don’t know.


This is where Vincent Price and Scooby-Doo came in handy. It’s pretty unlikely any kid is going to be legitimately frightened by an episode of Scooby-Doo. And yet, there are ghosts, goblins, witches, vampires, werewolves, creepers, and more, all running about. I’m actually not a huge Scooby fan, but I found the Cartoon Network Scooby-Doo Mystery Incorporated series to be excellent. I watched a big chunk of it with my kids, who were five and seven at the time. They loved it, and still do. We re-watch episodes regularly. In a world where asking a kid who has grown up with an iPhone to watch Bela Lugosi’s Dracula seems like a bridge too far, this is a show that is fast-paced, conversant in horror tropes, dabbles in grotesque/frightening imagery, and is funny, smart, and good. It’s also a show that prominently features Vincent Van Ghoul, who is a not-at-all-disguised representation of Vincent Price.

I think the world of Vincent Price. And while you might shy away from some of his 1970s work when it comes to screenings for young kids (things got pretty bloody), he spent the majority of his career as a boogeyman in a system that shied away from realistic violence. The result is a trove of movies that are neck-deep in Gothic imagery, but that aren’t actually frightening. I showed my daughter the Roger Corman/Vincent Price The Pit and the Pendulum when she was five, and she was all in. Several years later now, I’m taking her to theatre performances about the life of Edgar Allan Poe, and she’s reading her first Stephen King novel.

Introducing horror tropes in a way that wasn’t actually threatening helped to get my kids familiar with mythologies, characteristics, and images that would come to have more meaning later on as they got a little older and began seeing more things. Bride of Frankenstein is, believe me, easier for a kid to understand after they’ve seen Edward Scissorhands (featuring, of course, Vincent Price).

Recommendations

If you have little kids and want to introduce them to horror iconography in a relatively subdued presentation, you’d do well to consider the various iterations of Scooby-Doo and the Roger Corman/Vincent Price Poe films of the 1960s.

Every kid is different, and what excites and engages my kid might not be perfect for yours. But one of the lovely things about starting with the sillier end of the horror spectrum is that a kid can experience the fun of a Halloween vibe without actually getting scared out of their wits. After all, not everybody is going to graduate to enjoying The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Exorcist or The Babadook, but everybody can enjoy a creepy, spooky aesthetic on their own terms.

For young kids, I recommend:
Scooby-Doo Mystery Incorporated
Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island
The Haunted Palace
Fall of the House of Usher
House of Wax
The House on Haunted Hill
Ghostbusters

Posted by Vance K — Emmy-winning director and producer, cult-film reviewer and co-editor of Nerds of a Feather since 2012.

Fright vs. Fright: The House of Seven Gables

Fright vs. Fright is a series of comparisons between classic horror films and the lesser-known works that inspired them, or subsequent remakes that stand on their own merits.

The Film: Twice-Told Tales (1963)

The Plot: Twice-Told Tales is an anthology film, like many that were produced around the same time period, including Tales of Terror and Dr. Terror's House of Horrors. In this case, each of the three stories are inspired by the writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne. although only one of them actually comes from Hawthorne's short-story collection of the same name. The longest of the three, and most elaborate, is "The House of Seven Gables." In it, Gerald Pyncheon returns to his family home with his new bride Alice in order to try to find a treasure rumored to have been hidden when the house was constructed. But that construction wound up with the house falling under the curse of its maker, since Pyncheon's ancestor decided to accuse the architect, Matthew Maule, of witchcraft rather than pay him. Now, Alice begins seeing visions of Matthew and feeling drawn to Jonathan Maule, Matthew's descendant. All the while, Gerald's sister Hannah keeps reminding Gerald that he shouldn't have come back, since all Pyncheon men are cursed to die "with blood on their lips." And a painting of the first Pyncheon hanging on the wall in the study keeps bleeding from the mouth, and Gerald's drinking water keeps turning to blood. Just in case he didn't believe in spook-stuff. When Gerald thinks he's finally onto the treasure, he gets a little bloodthirsty (in the more traditional sense), and it becomes less and less certain that anybody will get out of this mess alive.

The Good, The Bad, The Indifferent: Twice-Told Tales is one of my favorite Vincent Price movies, and one I come back to almost every year around Halloween. The first two stories — "Dr. Heidigger's Experiment" and "Rappaccini's Daughter" — both have a lot of pathos and interesting twists, after a fashion. But "The House of Seven Gables" is all mustache-twirling scheming and ghost retribution. It amplifies the supernatural elements hinted at in the original story, and is short enough that in stripping away almost all but those elements, it's just Code-Era Hollywood gory fun. I'm wracking my brain to find something negative to say about it, but if you like this kind of thing, it's pretty great. But it is very much this early-60s horror vibe and not much else, so if that's not your bag, you'll probably be left flat.

Based On: The House of Seven Gables (1940)

How It Stacks Up: Watching this movie was kind of a joy. I realize that both versions share the same source material, so the 1963 version isn't directly inspired by the 1940 version, but that both of them feature Vincent Price in the lead, in two different roles, in two very different films made over 20 years apart was a lot of fun to see. This 1940 version hews much more closely to the source material, and any trace of the supernatural is circumstantial at best. Hawthorne was vexed by his family's involvement in the Salem Witch Trials two centuries earlier, and so his characters need not turn to the supernatural to do evil (even if they do invoke it for personal gain). There's no blood, really, and no horror, come to that, apart from how basely a man may treat his (literal) brother in the name of greed, so this film falls much more in line with films like the subsequent Portrait of Jennie or the Orson Welles/Joan Fontaine Jane Eyre (both the same decade), which you might call supernatural-adjacent, Old Hollywood romances.

Worth a Watch? Seeing Vincent Price play a romantic lead only two years after he made his first film is definitely worth a watch. It's not spooky, so maybe skip it for Halloween and go with Twice-Told Tales, but for sure put this one on your list for when that old-movie itch hits you.

Fun bit of connective tissue: Vincent Price, who featured last week in The Fly, brings us back to this film. So while it was completely unintentional, each of the films in this series has been connected by a performer. That we began and ended with Vincent is just icing on the cake.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012. Perennial watcher of dozens of horror movies each October. Does not live in a haunted house, despite what his son's friend thinks (look, kid, it was just the cats...).