MovieChat Forums > Histoires extraordinaires (1969) Discussion > Fellini and Mario Bava and great horror

Fellini and Mario Bava and great horror

posted 11 years ago by newyorkp7
2 replies | jump to latest

With his short segment in this film, Fellini proved that he could roll with the finest of horror directors. I just saw "Toby Dammit" again and I enjoy it more now than ever. I realize that Bava's "Kill Baby Kill" came first and as such, Fellini might have owed him some credit ( or did it come first, release dates are one thing...??). But Fellini took it somewhere else and it is brilliant. I love a pure horror movie as much as anyone- complete with the bad acting, bad plot lines, and overall badness- but sometimes I love an artful, complete horror too. This one is just extraordinary. Was he deliberately referencing Bava? Or was that devil's daughter thing just in the air at the time...

Can anyone point me to a good discussion of these two films as they relate to each other? Thanks in advance.

[–] Eve_of_Destruction 11 years ago

Oddly enough I thought my avatar was from Kill, Baby Kill but turns out it's from Spirits of the Dead... which I haven't seen yet.

Would a Cupcake kill you?

[–] filmscholar35 10 years ago

Well, certainly Martin Scorsese sees the connection that you are talking about.

When he was making "The Last Temptation of Christ", he decided to make the Devil a little angelic looking girl because he said he was inspired by "Toby Dammit" and "Kill, Baby...Kill!" . (In the novel of "Last Temptation", the Devil appears to Jesus during the "Last Temptation" at the cross, as a dark skinned, Arabic looking boy. But Scorsese thought that the Devils in the Fellini and Bava films were far more frightening, not to mention more DECEPTIVE, so he went with that idea; he gives credit to BOTH of these films for that decision in the book, "Scorsese on Scorsese", plus I believe that the Criterion Collection edition of the film has a bibliography that cites film, literary, and art references that Scorsese employed for the film, and both the Fellini and Bava films are cited.)