Mario Bava

Before he directed, Bava spent years as a cinematographer, and his horror frightens mostly through the camera: castles, fog, coloured light and slow tracking shots. Black Sunday opens on a princess executed for witchcraft who curses her brother's line. He also set out the rules of the giallo, with a tourist in Rome who witnesses a murder in The Girl Who Knew Too Much and a masked figure who kills a young model in Blood and Black Lace.

Signature

• Coloured gels and deep shadow on gothic sets (Black Sabbath, Kill, Baby... Kill!).
• The early giallo: the witness, the masked killer, the list of victims.
• Relatives thinning out the field for an inheritance in A Bay of Blood.
• Work in every commercial genre of the day: Hercules, Vikings, westerns, the comic-strip thief of Danger: Diabolik.