A Bay of Blood

‘But man isn’t an insect, my dear Simon. We have centuries of civilization behind us, you know?’ ‘No, I don’t know. I wasn’t there’.

This back and forth between fisherman Simon and entomologist Paolo Fosatti encapsulates the film’s thesis with cogent irony: man is likened to an insect, and his ephemeral, unnatural exoskeleton, painstakingly forged over the course of centuries of civilization, hides the intact nucleus of feral impulses directed at subjugating one’s neighbor and achieving self-centered pleasure. And it doesn’t take much for these buried impulses to reemerge in all their violence and destructiveness since, as mathematician and philosopher Thomas Hobbes asserted in an “absolutely certain postulate” of human nature, men are driven by a “cupiditas naturalis”, defined as “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death” Hobbes further postulated that this leads people to perceive others as obstacles to their own desire for self-affirmation. Thus, the disturbing series of killings we witness from the first to the last minute of the film can be seen as representing the direct and logical consequences of Hobbes’s above-cited hypotheses.

Abandoning Gothic refinement and splendor, the great Mario Bava – given carte blanche by producer Giuseppe Zaccariello – opts to deal with and in the contemporary world, and he does so with unparalleled skill by fleshing out a dismal backdrop swarming with petty, materialistic characters (even the first victim “clung to life and her money, she clung to that even more“). In short, it’s a world populated by voyeurs spying on their neighbors’ movements, a reality jam-packed with pathetic little men dropping like flies as they kill each other off.

Rightly considered a forerunner of the slasher subgenre, “A Bay of Blood” is also a good deal more complex and erudite than the majority of its American imitators which pale by comparison when it comes to the level of brutality – visual and conceptual – characterizing Bava’s film (the sequence where the octopus’s viscid tentacles latch onto a corpse’s rotting face single-handedly puts the entire “Friday the 13th” franchise to shame).

And then there’s that perverse, ironically sinister ending…