At the dawn of the 1960s, a number of Italian directors came to prominence with the rise of world cinema (or, rather, the construction of “world cinema” as an idea). Among the most famous, and certainly the most invested in dissecting the tensions of modernity, was Michelangelo Antonioni, whose 1960 film L’Avventura spreads outward in search of an exit from the present rather than following its line. Following two people who lose interest in searching for their suddenly-evaporated friend, the film suggests the limits of the detective’s epistemology, the hunt for the smoking gun. As we expect it to hone in, the film’s narrative seems to diffuse into the ether, as though something in the air and atmosphere was sucking dry the capacity to link cause to effect. Antonioni’s film suggests a search for an answer that, before long, blinds the protagonists to what question they were originally searching for. The need to reclaim a past, to resolve a conundrum, soon enough, unloosens into a wayward, wandering space where we can search around and within but not move toward.

At the same time, while Antonioni was exploring the limits of cinema’s capacity to follow narratives, prove conclusions, or answer problems, another Italian director was taking the old-school cinematic detective’s epistemology in another direction that, ultimately leads to a similar and similarly cruel meditation on the birth pains of the late 20^th century. While no one would mistake Italian horror maestro Mario Bava’s 1964 Blood and Black Lace for Antonioni – it is a loving Hitchcock tribute rather than Antonioni’s tribute to all that was inadequate about Hitchcock – Bava’s films also explored the inadequacy of their own governing principles, also investigated themselves. But they did so less out of Antonioni’s deconstructionist intellect, his interest in perusing the world’s death throes, than a desire to playfully push the living to their limits. Bava’s early films nominally replicate Alfred Hitchcock’s style, but like the master, you can see him breaching unasked questions, testing and contesting their own frameworks. Bava’s bold, primary-hued splotches of color and narrative looseness, where the trajectory of the character’s arcs and the flow of the narrative become increasingly difficult to parse, suggest a touch of the surreal, a  dream logic taking Hitchcock’s parts and recombining them for their own purposes just as surely as Godard did with old Hollywood gangster pictures.

What really united Bava and Antonioni is a gnawing recognition that the iron-tight confines of a Hollywood screenplay cannot explain the creeping contours of the world’s horror, a sense that the sheer terror of existence overflows any attempt to be placed into a narrative of heroes and villains, orderlies and culprits. (Not that Hitchcock himself ever held to those binaries, especially when he cast Jimmy Stewart). Both Antonioni and Bava ask us to reckon with the fact that they know much less than they let on, that their world propagates intangible mysteries. What if the film cannot curate the right information to make the killer’s identity meaningful or relevant to the narrative? What if the identity of the killer is, after all is said and done, arbitrary? Why, finally, do we even care so much about finding the correct identity of horrible acts, and what, more importantly, aspects of humanity’s rot does it allow us to overlook?

That’s perhaps a long lead-up to a seemingly superficial film, but Bava’s A Bay of Blood finds the Italian master pushing the confines of his art as far as he could take them in 1971. It lets us in on the secret in the opening scene, where a very typically giallo scene of a woman, the aged and seemingly wealthy Countess Federica (Isa Miranda) is strangled by an initially unseen killer. Until we do see the killer, who we learn to be her husband Filippo (Giovanni Nuvoletti), apparently resolving the conundrum, closing the film’s mystery prematurely. Before we can process the surprise revelation, he himself is killed by an in-turn unseen killer, at once extending the murderous chain and also subtly interrogating it: if, in fact, revealing the killer is so unceremonious, why does the mystery even matter in the first place?

A Bay of Blood takes this line of thinking and runs with it. Famously, finally, every person we see in the film either ends of dead or a murderer, and the majority of the characters fulfill both roles. But the final takeaway of the film is less a cunning trick  than a dawning malaise. As the kills fractalize, the notion of searching for and thereby demarcating a “correct” killer is revealed as a deeply dubious proposition in a society that infects seemingly everyone, where complex circles and tangles of worth and capital, the desire to control the Countess’s now up-for-grabs property, bring out the worst in everyone. Whatever is rotten here cannot be localized. Rather than a conservative and acquiescent retreat into an individualist politics of guilt and culpability, A Bay of Blood ponders if cinema can ever contain the spread of misanthropy, can even do anything except beautifully, tenuously (beautiful because its tenuous) bear witness to its own inadequacy.  

In this sense, this film’s Italian title, Reazione a Catena, which translates to Chain Reaction, is certainly the most texturally accurate, even if one of its English translations, Twitch of the Death Nerve, is more evocative. Although the blood runs freer and the atmosphere is more playful than an Antonioni film, A Bay of Blood thrums with the same curdled sense of Europe, perhaps the whole world, is a cesspool worthy of being filled with blood. As we move forward, the narrative continues to metastacize like a sickness. The elderly couple’s descendants descend on their bay, some of them already living there. We meet three couples: real estate agent Franco Ventura (Chris Avram) and his secretary Laura (Anna Maris Rosati), Paolo Fosetti (Leopoldo Trieste) and Anna Fosetti (Laura Betti), who live on their land but are not genetically related, and daughter Renata (Claudine Auger) and her husband Alberto (Luigi Pistilli) (and their two young children). There’s also Simon (Claudio Camaso/Claudio Volente) who is the illegitimate son of Federica, and who lives on the land as well, and four adventureous teens who arrive on the bay for cavorting and the like.

Interestingly, A Bay of Blood throws no real tricks our way. There are no red herrings. Everything that might cause us to suspect one character ends up being both relevant and, ultimately, misleading us by denying the full story. A Bay of Blood is ultimately a somewhat base film, its pleasures carnal and libidinal. There’s nothing really disingenuous about its effect on Friday the 13^th and tons of other C-grade slasher films in the ‘80s. It’s an immaculate slasher object. But the film’s open neck leeches into many open wounds, from Dario Argento’s later Suspiria, which openly turns the chaos into a metaphysical carnival of divine and demonic forces playing with human wills, to Bava’s own phenomenal Lisa and the Devil, a truly mercurial cinematic abyss. A Bay of Blood, though, feels like the tipping point, the fallout that tracks the debris after the ending of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point blew it all to smithereens. While Bava would create more supple and playfully pungent films later in the decade, none feel quite as jaundiced nor as keyed into the twitching death nerve of the world around it.

Score: 9/10