A BAY OF BLOOD

Mario Bava turns a fight over a dead woman’s waterfront property into an increasingly elaborate demonstration of how many ways the human body can come apart. A BAY OF BLOOD redefined the giallo, birthed the slasher genre and remains the film that changed the face of horror forever.

Made in 1971, Bava’s body-count masterpiece wrote the instruction manual for the coming slasher boom: young trespassers, sudden eruptions of violence, spectacularly inventive kills and a cast that keeps shrinking until practically no one is left to collect the spoils. But what its imitators borrowed was only the machinery. A BAY OF BLOOD is stranger and more poisonous—a lush, lurid joke about human greed that gradually does away with any distinction between murderer and victim, until the only mystery is who’ll be left alive long enough to kill who.