Blood and Black Lace - Response

Response

In Italy, Blood and Black Lace was a box office failure, grossing only 123 million lire (approximately US $77,000), earning back only half of the production cost. It was subsequently nearly forgotten and became difficult to see in that country until a 1999 home video release. In West Germany the film was a moderate financial success and helped convince the backers to film their subsequent Edgar Wallace-styled whodunits in color.

Because of the film's titillating combination of near-naked women and gory murder, American International Pictures passed on releasing Blood and Black Lace, despite having had commercial success with Bava's previous Black Sabbath and Black Sunday. AIP felt Bava's movie was "too intense, too adult for the 'kiddie trade'". The film was instead distributed in the U.S. by the Woolner Brothers (producers Lawrence and Bernard Woolner). Woolner Brothers released the movie after making only one minor change – the somewhat mundane original title sequence was replaced with a gory piece of semi-animation supplied by Rankin/Bass, featuring mannequins becoming riddled with bloody bullet holes.

The film received a generally mixed response at the time of its initial release from the few critics who bothered to review it. In The New York Times, A. H. Weiler complained, "Murdering mannequins is sheer, wanton waste. And so is Blood and Black Lace, the super-gory whodunit, which came out of Italy to land at neighborhood houses yesterday sporting stilted dubbed English dialogue, stark color and grammar-school histrionics." Variety felt it was an "okay mystery...handsomely produced..." Monthly Film Bulletin noted that the film was Bava's "most expensive-looking and decorative horror film to date".

The movie is often noted as an important title in the development of the giallo film genre, and is considered to be one of the major movies of the so-called "Golden Age" of Italian horror. Almar Haflidason, reviewing the film for BBC Online, said that "Director Mario Bava stages all these murders with the flair and style that was to become a founding mantle for the giallo films... Through a prowling camera style and shadow-strewn baroque sets that are illuminated only by single brilliant colours, he creates a claustrophobic paranoia that seeps into the fabric of the movie and the viewer." Glenn Erickson, aka "DVD Savant", noted "Bava probably didn't mean to invent a subgenre with Blood and Black Lace, a murder story which forgoes the slow buildups and character development of previous thrillers to concentrate almost exclusively on the killings themselves." Fernando F. Croce of Slant Magazine stated, "The roots of the Hollywood slasher are often traced back to Blood and Black Lace, yet Mario Bava's seminal giallo has a richness of texture and complexity of gaze that have kept its elaborate carnage scintillating even following decades of leeching from genre vultures."

Bava's mixture of eroticism and violence would prove a potent template for both giallo and slasher films. Tim Lucas has written that Blood and Black Lace was "one of the most influential thrillers ever made" and "the first authentic 'body count' movie".