I almost choked on my coffee :D when I heard Tim saying (on the LISA AND THE DEVIL audio-comm in BAVA BOX 2) that Bava's (and Margheriti's) tales about ghosts reliving their crimes was due to their shared enjoyment of (American, hrmm, Tim, British it should be) writer Algernon Blackwood, a.k.a. The Ghost Man when he read his supernatural stories on BBC in the Forties.

This comment intrigues me for two reasons:

1) Blackwood is a phenomenal writer that manages to convey the subtle aspects of the supernatural, also his literary style is very visual, almost prose-poetic.
Not unsimilar to Bava's visual artistry.

2) Although the likeness presented above, Blackwood's stories rarely deal with interior supernatural states of being (such as ghosts/hauntings, exceptions being the stories THE DAMNED, SECRET WORSHIP). Most often Blackwood's stories deal with the forces of nature, where someone undergoes a process of spiritual evolvement in contact with nature. For example THE WILLOWS, the novel THE CENTAUR.

I would like to know, if Bava [I]really read Blackwood in English. I'm uncertain if there where any Translations in Italian in the Sixties-Seventies.
But, as Bava ranked Lovecraft as his favorite author (according to Tim), the Blackwood influence is not surprising, as Lovecraft rated Blackwood as one of the modern masters of supernatural horror, along Arthur Machen.

Any comments - Tim ;)

Highly doubtful.

Bava almost certainly read Blackwood in Italian translation. He was a voracious reader always, and he became a compulsive reader of horror stories in magazines and book anthologies once he began to specialize in this kind of movie. I can't imagine Margheriti being familiar with Blackwood (who is namechecked in DANSE MACABRE/CASTLE OF BLOOD) without his stories being available in some Italian anthology or other.

Sorry about the commentary error; these things happen when I insert unscripted observations off the top of my head.

I passed the question to Mike Ashley, author of STARLIGHT MAN (the most complete biography ever on Blackwood) regarding Italian translations, but I have'nt yet received a reply.

It is probable that there were singular stories (such as THE DAMNED) translated in Italian magazines. I have'nt heard of an published Italian short story collection of Blackwood though.

Some of Blackwood's stories have been adapted for television in the Sixties, such as THE TERROR OF THE TWINS.

Bava would probably have enjoyed adapting Blackwood very much and he would have been the perfect man for it, both in terms of artistic sensibility and visual sfx expertise.

I could certainly see Bava doing great stuff with "The Empty House", "The Kit Bag", "A Haunted Island" or even "The Transfer"....

I was going to say that I don't have any specific memories of moments in films that suggest to me that he would have been the one to really visualize Blackwood's conception of malevolent nature and landscapes.

Bava's work (and of course I'm going out on a limb with so many experts hereabouts) strikes me as much more "interior"/Gothic/psychological than the quality of "exterior"/Occultic/primal force that infuses much (but, of course, not all) of Blackwood's stuff. And which is not to say that Blackwood wasn't psychological at times.

I don't know if the huge natural canvases of stories like "The Destruction of Smith", "The Willows", "The Wendigo" or even "The Man The Trees Loved" would attune well to Bava's approach.

But then, it occured to me that THE WURDULAK does a good job with the creepy Russian steppes scenery, and, IIRC, RABID DOGS (although not going for that kind of "vibe") had some nice Italian countryside footage.

Something like "The Transfer", with it's small-scale, evil patch of ground might have been just the ticket. I could see it soaked in some lime green gel-light, distinct from the rest of the lawn!

We'll never know...

They say he's still out there, somewhere... :ph43r:

I've seen translations of Blackwood into Italian dating to the seventies and eighties, but I don't know about earlier editions...

I agree with Shawn completely. Blackwood is much more to do with "outdoors" than Bava's more "interior" style. That's why Tim's comment made me so startled, as LISA.. should be associated with Blackwood?

I would rather associate it with the Decadents and the Symbolists, writers such as Baudelaire, Villiers del'Ilse Adam and Maeterlinck.

Imagine Bava adapting Maeterlinck's (highly interior) plays of "theatre statique"
for example AGLAVAINE ET SELYSETTE, LA MORT DES TINTAGILES, PELLEAS ET MELISANDE (adapted to an opera by Debussy) or ARIANE ET BARBE-BLEU.
No one would have done a better job than Bava on these plays!!

Also Bava's HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON does have a slight "Bluebeard" connotation to it (with the murderer Forsyth having his mannequins locked away like symbolic wives, when discovered by a "new Wife" unleashes his murder-lust).
Compare it by the way with Bartok's BLUEBEARD opera with libretto by Bela Balzacs. It was inspired by Maeterlinck's ARIANE AND BARBE BLEU.

My thoughts about Blackwood as an influence on Bava and Margheriti began with a discussion thread on the Latarnia Fantastique boards a few years ago. Unfortunately, the thread no longer exists but we were all looking for literary antecedents to CASTLE OF BLOOD and its notion of putting someone in an empty house where their life force awakens dormant spirits trapped in a cycle of damnation to repeat their past sins. In a moment of clarity, I looked at the family name of Blackwood and did some internet searching, which led me to a short story by Blackwood (I don't recall the title right now) that had this very theme. As someone else, on this board or Latarnia had previously noted, LISA bears a narrative resemblance along these lines to CASTLE OF BLOOD, and Margheriti himself revisited the concept again in his movie CONTRONATURA, which is even more like LISA. So, based on this, my very limited reading of Algernon Blackwood, I made the statement that knocked Matthias out of his chair. If there is a literary antecedent to these films, it does exist in Blackwood -- as Margheriti was forthright in acknowledging by lending Blackwood's name to the family in CASTLE OF BLOOD -- not necessarily in ALL of Blackwood, but in at least one story, yes.