The Shoestring Genius of Mario Bava
A short tale of low-budget ingenuity
See if you can guess the scene.
The wails of a distress signal slice the silence. They land, a slow descent into the abyss. Astronauts venture through the haze. The atmosphere drips with dread.
An enormous vessel looms. Abandoned. Alien. They creep through the cold corridors of the derelict ship. Strange devices jut out like broken bones. Shadows reign.
Then they see it. A giant skeleton splayed across the centre of the room. Mighty. Helpless. Whatever the creature was, it was monstrous.
Not monstrous enough to survive what killed it.
Their breathing quickens. Reality begins to sink in.
They’re insignificant.
They’re isolated.
They’re doomed.
You’re probably already patting yourself on the back. After all, it’s one of the most iconic moments in movie history.
Except… it isn’t.
Yes, Alien’s ‘Space Jockey’ set piece unfolds almost beat for beat as described above. But, even in 1979, genre aficionados had heard that tune before. Over a decade previously, 5,000 miles east of Hollywood, Italian director Mario Bava had turned his blood-stained hands to science fiction.
By 1964, Bava had quietly built a reputation as a resourceful low-budget horror craftsman, conjuring pervasive gothic dread in his credited directorial debut, Black Sunday (1960). At first glance, a lavish, outer-space adventure seemed an awkward fit for his moody, earth-bound stylings (not to mention well beyond his budgetary limits). But, after reading the short story Una notte di 21 ore, Bava saw potential. He bought the film rights, commissioned a script, and got to work. Months later, Planet of the Vampires (1965) was released.
The dominant mode of 1950s and early 1960s sci-fi cinema was bright and friendly, filmed on studio sets with static backdrops and cheery colours. Planet of the Vampires was different. To this pulpy story, replete with spaceships, alien worlds, and borderline nonsensical dialogue like “Synchronise the meteor shield. Engage neuro-vascular pressure,” Bava brought the moody, atmospheric flourishes that were becoming his trademark. Pulsating greens and reds bathe the planet in an unhealthy neon glow. Swirling layers of fog subsume our protagonists in darkness and shadow. Strange objects punctuate the landscape. Machines bleed; the ground breathes. Threats creep beyond the frame.
Though the film wasn’t a commercial success, commentators noted its striking aesthetic. It was, writes Tim Lucas, “widely praised as containing one of the most convincingly alien environments ever filmed.”
And, waiting in that alien environment, stark and mysterious, was that monstrous skeleton.
Was Alien’s ‘space jockey’ set piece a direct rip-off of Planet of the Vampires? It’s disputed. Alien’s director, Ridley Scott, denies having ever seen the earlier film. Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon, on the other hand, admits he “stole” the skeleton, while special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi worked on both films.
Either way, the movies’ shared sci-fi horror aesthetic - doom-laden and coldly hostile - endures. Like the distress signal that kicks off both films, its echoes wail through everything from Event Horizon (1997) to Life (2017), to the dozens of knockoffs that followed in Alien’s wake. Scott’s film was a force multiplier, propelling the gothic sci-fi stylings pioneered by Bava into the mainstream. “When you look at the two movies, it’s not just similarities. It’s lifted structure, scenes, characters, dilemmas, themes that are very apparent,” said Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn in 2016. “And with Alien, which is another masterpiece, it defined genre movies as having a very high artistic standard. But the irony is that it all comes back to this Italian movie that I don’t think has gotten the recognition it deserved.”
For all their similarities, one difference towers over Alien and Planet of the Vampires. Money. The former was produced for the princely sum of $11m. The latter was cobbled together for a paltry $200k.
Miniatures, matte paintings, polenta boiled on camping stoves: Planet of the Vampires was a catalogue of low-budget innovation. The towering ship before which the crew look so small? Forced perspective and strategically placed mirrors. The strange apocrypha that litters the landscape? Vacuum cleaner hoses and plastic fans. The ceiling of the alien vessel’s control room? Desk lamps and plastic cones, shrouded in incense smoke.
In fact, nearly everything that makes Bava’s film atmospheric - uncanny-valley props, choking fog, neon-saturated gels - was born of brute necessity, not artistic indulgence. With jack-all money to spend, he was forced to compromise. “Do you know what that mysterious planet in [Planet of the Vampires] was made of?” he later claimed. “A couple of plastic rocks—and I mean ‘two’: one and one!—that were left over from some mythological picture made at Cinecittà.”
Planet of the Vampires wasn’t the first film Bava stitched together on a shoestring. It wasn’t the last, either. Bava’s cinema is a cinema of compromise. Making do. Finding a way. Like the masked killer in his slasher precursor, Blood and Black Lace (1964), his legacy is split in two. Practically unknown outside cinephile circles, he is talismanic within them, cited by Scorsese, Coppola, Tarantino, Burton, and more.
The Italian maestro’s artistry is usually praised as something achieved despite constraints. “Just imagine,” the conventional wisdom goes, “what he could have achieved with more money! ” That’s Hollywood logic for you. In this era of ballooning budgets, the difference between good and great is a few zeroes on a spreadsheet.
But that logic is dissolving before our eyes. “How can this cost $400m?” we groan at the latest washed-out, green-screened superhero instalment. “Where did the money go?” we ask as another blockbuster stumbles through shoddy lighting and clumsy set pieces. How many Bavas have been chewed up and spat out by the studio system, the diamond-encrusted knife they were handed planted squarely in their backs?
What if we’ve had it backwards all along? What if Bava’s genius emerged because of, rather than despite, his paltry budgets?
The swirling fog that gives Planet of the Vampires its oppressive mystery was, by Bava’s own admission, a cheap way to disguise a sparse set. The innovations that define his mise-en-scène - aggressive colour-gel lighting, matte paintings, unusual camera angles - were shortcuts to atmosphere, bypassing the expensive effects and extravagant sets of his peers.
Without these constraints, would he have produced the same results? Bava clearly thought not. Shortly after Planet of the Vampires, Paramount gave him a comparatively lavish $3m to make the action film Danger: Diabolik, his first and only dalliance with a Hollywood studio.
Bava made the whole film for $400k.
This was an edited extract of a new project I’m working on. MORE TO COME…
Black Sunday opening scene is perfection.