Production
Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960) and Black Sabbath (1963) were worldwide commercial successes. As a consequence, Bava was given creative control over Blood and Black Lace. An Italian-West German co-production, the film's backers were expecting a routine murderer-on-the-loose yarn in the Edgar Wallace-tradition. In Europe during the early 1960's, movies based on the murder mystery novels of the incredibly prolific Wallace had become a mini-genre of their own. Forty or so of these movies were made, most of them produced in West Germany. Although some of the murder sequences could be vicious, the emphasis was on the police procedural and mystery aspects of the narrative.
But Bava was "bored by the mechanical nature of the whodunit" and decided to deemphasize the more accepted clichés of the genre. The stalk-and-kill sequences themselves were given more importance than all other concerns. He emphasized horror and sex in ways that had usually only been hinted at before.
Under the working title of L'atelier della morte ("the fashion house of death"), the movie was filmed in Rome, during a six-week period between November 1963 and January 1964. The exterior locations of the fashion house were filmed at the Villa Sciarra and not at the Villa Pamphili as incorrectly reported by many sources.
The film's budget was low, approximately $150,000. Bava was forced to improvise numerous times during the production in order to get the technical results he wanted. Cameron Mitchell noted that in order to film an impressive dolly shot through the fashion house, Bava simply placed the camera on a child's red wagon. Similarly, Bava completed several crane shots by utilizing a "makeshift seesaw contraption".
The script was written in English in order to allow easier exportation to the United States. All of the cast members spoke their lines in English, some of them phonetically. However, after the production was completed, the original English-language soundtrack was not utilized for the U.S. release prints. A completely new dubbing track was produced in Los Angeles under the supervision of Lou Moss. Nearly all of the male voices were provided by Paul Frees.
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