Hello, my name is Justin the Klu, and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

Justin's baby is crying in the background because it's Shocktober!

Don't you mean it's the screams of the death?

The children of the night, what music they make.

That's a man in a gorilla suit.

Yeah, I was going to say, Arceio Hall of Kahn.

Yeah.

You know what?

That's a good gorilla sound that you could make.

That's right.

Today we're talking about the master of the macabre himself, Mario Bava.

And we chose this topic because, well, we chose it in about 20 seconds last week where we were like, okay, let's do a foreign guy. How about, how about Italy? Let's treat ourselves to Italy. Bava? Yeah. You know? And let's me just bring up that Wikipedia page just reading off of it. But actually, so I have three pages of notes about Mario Bava here. And I am no closer actually to coming up with like a grand thesis of Mario Bava. What do you mean by grand thesis? I'm no closer to penetrating what I feared might be like my obstacle with this episode, which is, boy, these movies look great. And then getting further beyond that. But I think you and me together, we can crack this. We can do this. It's not like there are voluminous tomes of literature written about him. It's not like he's one of the like three most important horror directors of all time. So I watch a documentary that came out quite a while ago. And in the documentary, they talked a lot about how, ah, Bava in his lifetime was never appreciated.

He didn't really get the respect he deserves.

And that's a curious lens to view him through because he is so respected now.

He is synonymous with horror.

I'd say that of all the Italian horror guys, even more than Argento, he's the one who has

crossed the most over into the canon, you know, or come the closest to that.

But at the same time, like in that documentary, they talked a lot about he never became like

a hitchcock, that he never succeeded in like coming to America, making a movie for English

language audiences, and then,

you know, getting into the mainstream. His films, you know, he only directed, and it's very

surprising to see this from like 1960. His last film was in 77, but after 1971, the films really

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