A Bay of Blood

A Bay of Blood (Ecologia del delitto, 1971) is an Italian giallo from director Mario Bava that you can watch online on iFILM — the film that critics now widely credit as the direct blueprint for the American slasher genre. An elderly countess is strangled in her wheelchair by her husband, who wants her coastal estate. He barely has time to congratulate himself before someone puts a knife through him.

From there, the body count climbs with clinical efficiency. Greedy relatives close in on the inheritance, a group of teenagers makes the mistake of camping on the supposedly empty grounds, and a young woman arrives looking for a father who has gone silent. Bava stages each kill as a sharp visual composition rather than a prolonged set piece — he's interested in geometry and color, not gore for its own sake.

Shot in three weeks on a modest budget, the film directly influenced a generation of American horror directors and you can see the DNA of Friday the 13th in at least two sequences. Claudine Auger and Luigi Pistilli lead a cast that's meant to be disposable, and they know it. Lean, brutal and technically precise — exactly what Bava does best. Stream A Bay of Blood online on iFILM.