Recovering from a nervous breakdown several years ago, Dora (Daria Nicolodi, INFERNO) – along with her son Marco (David Colin Jr.) and her pilot husband Bruno (John Steiner, TENEBRAE) – returns to the seaside villa where she once lived with her late husband. Bruno is wary of the fragility underlying Dora's demeanor but he cannot be home all of the time. Dora is unnerved by Marco's natural curiosity about his real father, but his sudden acquisition of an imaginary friend coincides with sudden aggressive behavior towards her ("Mother, I have to kill you") and a series of increasingly deadly pranks that start to convince Dora that her dead husband is using their son to persecute her.
The final theatrical film of Mario Bava (who died in 1980), SHOCK was as much a swan song as a means of nudging son and longtime assistant director Lamberto Bava (DEMONS) into the director's chair (Bava the younger is credited as "assistant to the director" in the opening titles) just as forty years before colleague Riccardo Freda reportedly did the same thing by walking out on the productions of I VAMPIRI and CALTIKI, THE IMMORTAL MONSTER which were both finished by the elder Bava. Reportedly, however, the younger Bava – who is co-credited with the screenplay (more about that below) – undertook the project to get his father back into directing after LISA AND THE DEVIL was taken away from him by producer Alfredo Leone and reworked into HOUSE OF EXORCISM and RABID DOGS was shelved due to bankruptcy proceedings against producer Robert Loyola (the film would not be released until 1998 when it was finished by the younger Bava).
Released stateside as a sequel to THE EXORCIST cash-in BEYOND THE DOOR, the film show both Bavas less concerned with in-vogue possession theatrics than in separate themes that would recur in the filmographies of both directors. In the case of the elder, we have the intersection of haunting and paranoia that marked "The Telephone" and "The Drop of Water" segments of BLACK SABBATH and HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON, children as loci of the supernatural from KILL BABY KILL and BARON BLOOD, as well as the haunting as a continuation of masochistic ecstasy in THE WHIP AND THE BODY. In the case of the younger, we have an "exorcism" of childhood terrors, exposing human madness in the darkness of A BLADE IN THE DARK and MACABRE while here we have an acknowledgement of the "mechanics" of Bava's horror trickery in the way a puppet show involving a queen and a ghost as well as a makeshift magic lantern show performed by Marco in the basement prefigure Bava Sr.'s in-camera trickery for the Dora's hauntings and hallucinations from the simplicity of a rose petal on piano keys mistaken for a drop of blood or a rake as clutching hand to the invisible hands that pull a blanket from her body and her hair floating upwards and lashing across her face.
The film is most successful when focusing on the psychological battleground between mother and son while a visit to a psychiatrist (an underused Ivan Rassimov, MAN FROM DEEP RIVER) and a scene in which Bruno's plane experiences supernaturally-triggered turbulence. The score by progressive rock band I Libra is one of the more experimental touches on a Bava film since Ennio Morricone's diverse instrumentation for DANGER: DIABOLIK Рmore so than Stelvio Cipriani's lounge and bossa work on the Bava films in between the two Рand the photography of Alberto Spagnoli (KILLER FISH) and an uncredited Bava not only favors naturalistic lighting that somehow makes the modern villa setting even more alien but also camera movements that are more "subjective" in their handheld shakiness that give a more corporeal feeling to the ghostly presence that Dora appears to actually see in one sequence of the camera approaching her. The ending is similarly perverse as that of A BAY OF BLOOD. Bava's final directorial effort would be LA VENERE D'ILLE, a TV adaptation of Prosper M̩rim̩e's story "La V̩nus d'Ille" which also starred Nicolodi and was co-directed by Lamberto Bava.
Released theatrically in the United States and subsequently on VHS from Media Home Entertainment as BEYOND THE DOOR II – in a version that trimmed the sequence with Marco meeting the psychiatrist – and elsewhere under its export title, SHOCK got its first complete release stateside from on DVD and VHS from Anchor Bay Entertainment in 2000 (an identical DVD edition was reissued by Blue Underground in 2007) but it lagged so far behind most of Bava's filmography (even behind the release of Bava Jr.'s official directorial debut) in reaching Blu-ray.
Arrow Video's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray comes from a new 2K scan of the original 35mm camera negative. One of Bava's most naturalistic-looking films with no irrational color gels and conservative use of gobo shadows, the new HD master improves on the SD transfers in more subtle ways, the brightness levels lending more convincing shading to the film's few make-up effects – Carlo looks ghostly even in "living" form but that has more to do with the way Italian exploitation seemed to represent drug addicts as extremely pale as in films like CRIMES OF THE BLACK CAT or ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK – while the heightened resolution reveals Bava carefully placing objects in the periphery of shots from the appearances of the hand sculpture to the soon to be animate furniture and bric-a-brac in the cellar.
English and Italian audio options are included along with English SDH and English subtitles, and the choice of English or Italian version dictates the default audio and subtitle options (you cannot view the English subtitles with the English track or the English SDH with the Italian for comparison but you can jump back and forth between versions by switching versions from the popup menu), as well as the option of English or Italian credits – the title remains SHOCK (not SCHOCK) on both credits – and alternate takes of a handwritten note in either language. Both versions are complete since the psychiatrist scene was included in the export version and only excised from the US theatrical cut.
The film is accompanied by a brand new audio commentary by Tim Lucas, author of "Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark", who was not asked to do a track for the original Anchor Bay release; which is just as well since Lucas mentions that he was not able to interview actor Colin Jr. when he was writing his book but has since contacted him. In addition to providing some background on the development of the script from a period in the late sixties, he also mentions the unattributed source novel "The Shadow Guest" by Hilary Waugh to which the final product bears only the most superficial resemblance as well as how the film is informed by a number of more recent films and literary works from the obvious like REPULSION to a quite heavy debt to DEEP RED and even Lucio Fulci's THE PSYCHIC, both of which involve supernatural nudging towards a discovery behind a bricked-up wall (while the former also included a little boy warped by a past crime). He also provides background on the film, including Nicolodi's anorexia and calling estranged partner Dario Argento to visit the set for moral support, as well as recollections of Steiner and Colin Jr. (son of David Tyron Collin, the founder of the American University of Rome) who invested his BEYOND THE DOOR earnings to fund his education and is now an economist.
The disc also features a handful of new interviews. In "A Ghost in the House" (30:34), co-director and co-writer Lamberto Bava recalls assisting his father as well as Ruggero Deodato – for whom he also co-wrote WAVES OF LUST – and Dario Argento. He recalls wanting to get his father working again and going back to a treatment written by Dardano Sacchetti (MANHATTAN BABY) and Francesco Barbieri (EMERGENCY SQUAD) and shopping it around to various producers before Turi Vasile (MINNESOTA CLAY) and I.I.F. who insisted on their own writer with playwright Alessandro Parenzo (THE PRIVATE LESSON) credited as "Paolo Brigenti" whose script would be heavily rewritten by Bava. He also discusses how his father faked being tired to get him to direct more of the film – Bava Jr. estimates he did twenty-five percent including the more dialogue-heavy scenes – working with the cast, and his father's trickery (as well as the film's memorable jump scare).
In "Via Dell’Orologio 33" (33:48), co-writer Sacchetti recalls that his public dispute with Argento following CAT O'NINE TAILS got him more notice and job offers, and that his original concept for the film was one of two treatments he proposed to producer Giuseppe Zaccariello (THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN) that also included BAY OF BLOOD which went into production while "Via Dell’Orologio 33" fell between the cracks. He started to develop it under producer Loyota but it wound up in the bankruptcy assets and he did not know it was going into production under Bava until he was informed by screenwriter/actor Luigi Montefiori aka George Eastman (ANTRHOPHAGUS) that Bava Jr. had asked him to do some rewrites. The producers told Sacchetti that he had not rights to the film since was not one of the claimants on Loyola's assets, but he and Barbieri would end up credited on the film. Sacchetti discusses his concept and how the film differed little from it apart from making the father an addict and the stepfather a pilot, and how Lucio Fulci was intended to direct a script of his closer to the original that would end up being directed by Lamberto Bava as UNTIL DEATH for the BRIVIDO GIALLO series of TV movies.
In the video essay "The Devil Pulls the Strings" (20:45), author and critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas discusses puppetry as a metaphor for possession, the centrality of the plaster hand of Buddha prop even though it is never mentioned in the dialogue, and the ways the materiality of the domestic space becomes alienated by the supernatural, making this a companion piece not only to her essay for DEMONS and DEMONS 2 but also the recent British Blu-ray for the American film SESSION 9.
In "Shock! Horror! – The Stylistic Diversity of Mario Bava" 2021 (51:46), author and critic Stephen Thrower makes the argument that the knowledge of Lamberto Bava as a co-director really does not make the film any less "pure" of a Mario Bava work, and that the ways in which is disconnected from his classic works of horror are actually evident in a number of his later horror films, positing to stages of his horror filmography with I VAMPIRI to KILL BABY KILL in the first and HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON to SHOCK in the latter (with works like DANGER: DIABOLIK, DR. GOLDFOOT AND THE GIRL BOMBS, and FIVE DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON in between). Thrower also cites the familiar filmic and literary inspirations but notes that the various pranks, hallucinations, and scares are less about making the audience jump out of their seat but jangling them into a relatable degree of fear as the protagonist.
"The Most Atrocious Tortur(e)" (4:12), an interview with critic Alberto Farina, is quite brief but a worthy addition as the critic recalls interviewing Nicolodi for OPERA and her showing him a drawing Bava did for her depicting Dora and her various torments that included an advent calender-like door cutout of the child under which was written "Mother, I have to dub you" referencing Bava being forced to redub Nicolodi's performance because the producers felt her voice to masculine, and the title of the drawing being the misspelled English language title of the interview piece.
The disc also includes the Italian theatrical trailer (3:35) as well as four BEYOND THE DOOR II TV spots as well as a double bill spot with THE DARK (1:51 in total), and three image galleries featuring posters, the Italian fotobusta, and the Japanese souvenir programme. Not provided for review were the reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Christopher Shy – presumably the original artwork is the Italian piece cribbed from the American paperback cover painting for Shirley Jackson's "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" as well as an illustrated collector's booklet featuring new writing on the film by Troy Howarth, author of "The Haunted World of Mario Bava" (included with the first pressing only).
An alternate O-card edition with the BEYOND THE DOOR II title is available exclusively from Arrow Video's American site (as well as Arrow Films' British site).
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