Shock (1977) Italian Horror without the gorgeous flamboyance (Review)

Final films of legendary directors is a fascinating topic. For every Kenji Mizoguchi who bowed out with a genuine masterwork like 1956’s Street of Shame, there are stories of directors who couldn’t finish their final works or an untimely passing that required someone else to pick up the baton. Looking at you, Battle Royale II. Mario Bava’s last film, Shock (1977) – out now on Arrow Video, was made after being pushed by his son, Lamberto, to make a “modern horror film” inspired by the likes of Stephen King. Shock is compelling swansong when you think about it in terms akin to Hitchcock’s Frenzy – here is a classic director doffing his cap to the contemporary era. Like Kinji Fukasaku with his final film, Mario Bava couldn’t finish this alone – he required the assistance of his director son, Lamberto Bava, to help him finish even if Bava Jr would go uncredited for his work.

Bava was never so contained with his location work, making his final film the rarest of things, a three-hander. Giallo legend Daria Nicolodi (Dora) is subject to ghosts from her past butting heads with her attempts to live a new life. She and her son Marco (David Collin Jr) have moved back into the old family home along with her new man, Bruno (John Steiner) – only there’s something dark in Dora’s past. Her previous husband, Carlo, was a drug addict who eventually committed suicide, sending Dora into a deep spiral that saw her spending a spell in the local sanatorium. At first, we are privy to a picture postcard of a happy family, a status quo that cannot possibly last. After pottering around the mysterious basement full of abandoned and battered furniture, Marco becomes possessed by the ill intent of her dead husband’s wandering spirit – what follows is a psychological ghostly terrorisation that never leaves the four walls of their house and garden.

The first thing that comes to mind with Mario Bava is the visual splendour of his work. He made great use of the camera, and when he shot in colour, his films are some of the most visually stunning – Blood and Black Lace alone boggles the mind. Bava, above all else, was a prodigiously talented cinematographer. Here is where I bring up that Shock is a continuation of that narrative, only that isn’t the case. Alberto Spagnoli is the credited DoP, with Bava picking up some uncredited slack. Spagnoli is no upstart, he shot the handsome Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972). And, here, to be perfectly blunt – Shock is a flat, unremarkable-looking. Of course, this has no real bearing on the horror credentials of the 1977 swansong; my issue here is how prominent this fact becomes when sat within one of the most flamboyant filmographies in genre cinema history.

Bava was worked with creepy kids before in 1966’s Kill Baby… Kill, even so, Marco is a much different proposition. Gone are the gothic trappings, now we have mother and son in a fresh, airy modern home. Dora is tentative about moving into the house as that is where she previously lived with her deceased husband in an incident that destroyed her fragile mental health. Justifiably hesitant. And for a while, life is relatively normal until Marco goes into the basement and his behaviour becomes erratic. Later, there’s a dinner party in which Dora has some friends over that she hasn’t seen for a while, and in a quieter moment, Marco says: “I’m going to kill you”. And not in the innocuous way where 8-year olds say things without fully understanding the gravity of their words – he knew exactly what he was saying.

What follows is something of a grab bag of Italian horror ideas, which is to say, its Italian horror – it has no rules. Marco has been possessed by the spirit of his father that allows him to transform at a whim, including the films most famous jump scare. Then again, he may be possessed by the evil aura drenching this otherwise lovely home. The one certainty is the possession. He cuts things that may end up crushing his mum, like heavy window shutters. There’s a scene with ghost apparitions of floating knives, infected nightmares whose effects happen in the waking world, and Marco seems to have developed a version of voodoo that works with a cutout photo. As I said, Italian horror and logic are not bedfellows, and it works all the better this way. The common threads throughout all this horror is a kid who learned his death-stare from watching Meiko Kaji in Female prisoner scorpion and Daria Nicolodi (Deep Red, Phenomena) slowly losing her grasp on reality. I hate to be repetitive, but the success of Shock is hampered by it lacking that Bava flair. The sad truth is, Shock could have been directed by anyone – much like Frenzy, which I cited earlier, funnily enough.

One for Italian horror and Bava family completists, maybe, but definetely worth a watch as an outlier of 1970s horror. Extras include a generous selection of interviews with people from co-writer Dardano Sacchetti to critics and historicans who offer appreciations, visual essays and audio commentaries, plus one Bava finds his way onto the extras with Mario’s son and co-director, Lamberto Bava. It is one of the most generously stacked selection of extras that Arrow Video have offered in quite some time.

ROB’S ARCHIVE – SHOCK (1977)