Kill, Baby… Kill! (1966) DVD Review

The story of Kill, Baby… Kill! is unusual and has many similarities to Hammer, and for that matter the Universal horror films from the 1930s – 1940s. But it also has many departures. Hammer’s gothic horror films mostly featured some monster or other or else it’s lesser well known films might be psychological thrillers. It never really ventured into the ghost story territory that Bava’s film does, nor did thet have the child the central ‘monster’. These days, we are more familiar with the child/ghost story horror with the likes of the J-Horror films that came out of Japan in the late 1990s and the noughties, as well as earlier precedents such as, of course, The Exorcist (1973) and it’s many other interpretations and incarnations. Yet, Kill, Baby, Kill has closer ties to Henry James, whose novel, ‘The Turn of the Screw’ had been adapted in the brilliant The Innocents (1961), the Victorian ghost story of a sexually repressed governess looking after a couple of odd children. But there also the usual gothic Hammer horror types: an innkeeper, young virginal girls, a bland young male hero, gravediggers and a Mrs Haversham type widow. The mise-en-scene of the sets too are similar to the earlier Hammer films. But much of the film is shot on location in the medieval old town of Faleria, north of Rome. It is shot, mostly at night to great effect, with the director using his trademark garish colour gels to good and artistic effect. The film was released in Italy under the title, Operazione Paura (which literally translated as Operation Fear) and in (West) Germany under the even more laughable exploitative title, Die toten Augen des Dr. Dracula.