The Whip and the Body (1963) - film review

It has been many years since Kurt Menliff has been disowned by his father, Count Vladimir, after driving a servant girl to suicide.  Now, he has returned to the old family home, uninvited and unwelcome, ostensibly to attend his brother’s wedding to the beautiful Nevenka.  But, as his father suspects, Kurt has a darker motive.  Nevenka was originally intended to be his bride and he wastes no time in re-establishing his sadomasochistic relationship with her.  Not long after he whips Nevenka into a frenzy of ecstasy on a deserted beach, Kurt is stabbed to death by a mysterious assailant.  After Kurt’s burial, Nevenka is visited by the spectre of her former lover, who appears determined to continue their sordid love affair from beyond the grave...

The most sexually provocative of all Mario Bava’s films is also his most visually stunning, a sensual Gothic horror masterpiece in which the director’s fascination with psychological aberration and the supernatural attains its most powerful cinematic expression.  Badly mutilated by the censors on its initial release and subsequently mauled by prudish critics, the film has since gained a new lease of life through its painstaking restoration and release on DVD.  The film is a classic of the horror genre, offering not only the incomparable pairing of horror icon Christopher Lee with Israeli beauty Daliah Lavi as the willing participants in the raunchiest of master-slave relationships, but also some superbly atmospheric cinematography, which includes Bava’s trademark use of coloured gels and inspired lighting effects.  If this film were a painting, it would probably be hanging in the Louvre, so stunning is its visual composition.

Whilst few are likely to be shocked by the film’s sexual content today, The Whip and the Body still works extremely well as a horror film.  Bava builds the tension masterfully through some remarkable art design and camera work, which effectively blur the boundary between reality and fantasy.  We may lament the fact that Christopher Lee is dubbed by another actor (in both the English and Italian versions of the film), but his mere presence is enough to chill the blood and he gives one of his creepiest horror performances.  Lee’s extreme close-up shots are genuinely blood curdling, revealing a fiend consumed with hungry intent, and are far more viscerally thrilling than anything we may find in his frequent horror outings with Hammer.  Cadaverous claw-like hands reaching out towards the spectator and ominous leering faces at windows are just two of the familiar Bava motifs that serve to make this one of the director’s most terrifying of horror fantasies. 

What perhaps most makes the film so deeply unsettling is Bava’s use of sound.  The wind screaming through the old house, the leaden footsteps of the approaching night phantom and the demonic cry of the whiplash slicing the air like a wild beast all conjure up a vision of Hell, a torrid nightmare that promises only suffering and no prospect of escape.  But what these sounds really represent is something much darker, the anticipatory delight of the slave-victim longing for the sensual catharsis that only complete submission to the master can yield.   The Whip and the Body is far more than an erotic horror film.  It is an indescribably dark and complex study in desire, Bava’s most sophisticated, most disturbing and most visually arresting film.  Many other filmmaker have attempted to marry sex and horror, the two facets of human experience that most fascinate and repulse us, but only Mario Bava can be said to have consummated the union, in this stylishly lurid Gothic chiller.

© James Travers 2011

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