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This chapter provides an overview of Mario Bava's film Blood and Black Lace (6 donne per l'assassino) in 1964. It mentions critics and commentators of the Blood and Black Lace movie who were spellbound by its fascinating visual analogy that links the opening and final images. It also looks into analyzations of the film that proposes the most disparate interpretations. The chapter discusses Bava's demystifying explanation of his movie in an interview published in 1979, just one year before his death. It talks about the significance of the opening scene of Blood and Black Lace and interprets the connection between the signboard swinging at the beginning, during a rainstorm, and the telephone falling on the ground.

This chapter discusses how Mario Bava opted color for his film Blood and Black Lace (6 donne per l'assassino), which he had also done in his previous horror films. It talks about Bava's employment of Eastmancolor for the saturated colour compositions of his Gothic movies that drove the colour consultants on set to distraction. It also illustrates the context in which the characters moved in Blood and Black that ended up looking like a non-place, both baroque and abstract, that brought together elements typical of the Gothic genre. The chapter describes Blood and Black Lace's labyrinthine atelier of death as a modern-day subsidiary of Gothic's castles, with crypt, secret passages, curtains fluttering in the night, and mannequins instead of suits of armour. It also looks into the insistence of shapes that move with mechanical regularity that represented Blood and Black Lace's microcosm, where the distinction between human and nonhuman becomes uncertain, fleeting, and deceptive.

This chapter highlights Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace (6 donne per l'assassino) that was advertised in Italy as an out-and-out whodunnit type of film. It argues why the film should not be considered as a whodunnit in accordance with the rules of the period, such as its lack of comic relief and the British setting. It also explains the Blood and Black Lace's lack of a proper through-line of detection, in which each victim and murder are the object of a separate section and a potentially self-contained mini-narrative. The chapter describes the very “thin” human factor in the film Blood and Black Lace's initial introduction of characters during the opening credits. It points out how Blood and Black Lace was a film about a crime story that lacked a strong detective figure.

This chapter explores the significance of German participation in the film Blood and Black Lace. It discusses how Italy had signed a co-production agreement with West Germany in 1962 that started the passage from period Gothic to a thriller set in the present day. It also explains the Italian film makers' intention of joining the successful thread of the German so-called “krimis,” the murder mysteries inspired by the works of Edgar Wallace and produced by Preben Philipsen's Rialto film company in 1959. The chapter focuses on the distinct and well-defined tradition of mystery in Italy. It describes the genre known as “giallo,” which had been very popular since 1929 when the Italian publishing house, Mondadori launched a new editorial series called the Yellow Books (I Libri Gialli).

This chapter describes how the murderer in the film Blood and Black Lace (6 donne per l'assassino) became an icon through its clothing, which included a raincoat, hat, and black gloves. It explains how the outfit of the murderer in the film, like a haute couture model, will be copied over and over in forthcoming gialli. The chapter analyzes the multiple literary and filmic influences identified in Mario Bava's faceless murderer and Edgar Wallace's novel White Face to the German krimis. It mentions faceless figures that populate Man Ray's surrealist short film Les Mystères du château de Dé in 1929, which was considered the most outstanding and surprising predecessors on iconic images of murderers. It also analyzes how masked murderers in films are more than a gimmick to hide the identity but emphasizes an almost feral attribute due to its muteness.

This chapter highlights diverse influences that resulted in the film Blood and Black Lace (6 donne per l'assassino). It explains how Mario Bava and his co-scriptwriters expunged all traces of humour from the story, eliminating the annoying comic interludes that plagued the film La ragazza che sapeva troppo. It also investigates how the makers of Blood and Black Lace drew from other sources and enhanced the Gothic mood that characterised the Edgar Wallace Krimis cycle. The chapter describes the ways in which violence in films is directed towards the female body, such as the opening sequence of the film La maschera del demonio where the character Asa is tortured with the titular spiked mask and burned at the stake. It discusses how horror underlined a radical change in the erotic imagery of the average Italian.

This chapter looks at the popularity of Mario Bava, which was already a prestigious name in the context of the genre cinema in Italy and abroad. It talks about Bava that was mentioned on the cover of the critical anthology Film 1964 that was curated by Vittorio Spinazzola and linked by the significant subtitle of “mass movies and avant-garde cinema.” It also points out why the film Blood and Black Lace (6 donne per l'assassino) was not a commercial success in Italy despite the critics' interest on Bava and the commercial potential of the story. The chapter discusses critics that were content to concede Blood and Black Lace's stylistic qualities and its exquisite tricks of the trade. It looks at the newspaper La Stampa's review about how the film dispenses thrills and emotions by way of the director's excellent technique than with the shaky gimmicks of a clumsy script.

This chapter analyzes the baroque complexity of the murder scenes in Blood and Black Lace (6 donne per l'assassino). It explains how the film was modelled after Alfred Hitchcock, who had always given great importance to elaborate murder sequences in his works. It also mentions the film Caccia all'uomo that was directed by Mario Bava's friend, Riccardo Freda, which was a stunning anticipation of what would be found in the forthcoming gialli. The chapter talks about Bava's Blood and Black Lace that reprised the emphasis on the crescendo which precedes death and multiplied it while amplifying the atrocity of the killing itself. It describes the murder sequence of the film that was characterised by a well-defined environment and has its own specificity regarding the characteristics of the victim, such as the ways of her dispatching and the murder weapon.

This chapter looks into Mario Bava's aesthetic sensibility and synthesis of the stylistic and thematic thread that underlies the film Blood and Black Lace (6 donne per l'assassino). It explains how viewers of the film associated the gimmick of using mannequins with the opening pages of Gialli Mondadori, which include a list of characters and their qualification in order to give the reader a “human map” on which to rely when reading. It also discusses how the same concept of a human map is reinvented in the film Blood and Black Lace in a visual key with a surrealistic effect through the use of mannequins. The chapter analyzes the poses of mannequins that are considered artificial, enigmatic, and disturbing. It highlights how mannequins reiterate the initial equation between men and anthropomorphic objects, in which mannequins provide cautionary shadows for actors and actors are sometimes caught in the act of making the same gesture as the mannequins.

This chapter discusses the film Blood and Black Lace (6 donne per l'assassino) that has become a cult movie over the years. It mentions how many young cinephiles became aware of the film in the 1980s via the opening sequence of the Matador film in 1986 by Pedro Almodóvar. It also talks about the fruition of a genre film through the filter of a thought-provoking auteur such as Almodóvar, who summed up the most obvious elements of an erotic mise-en scène of death with a paradoxical commentary through the protagonist's sexual arousal. The chapter describes the influence of Blood and Black Lace on foreign cinema, such as the film “Halloween” in 1978 by John Carpenter that reinvents Mario Bava's expressionless, ubiquitous, and mute assassin into a new icon. It also cites the 1984 film A Nightmare on Elm Street that features a murderer wearing a lethal razorblade glove which recalls the spiked weapon seen in Bava's film.