Shock (1977) Review

Dora Baldini (Daria Nicolodi), her husband Bruno (John Steiner) and son Marco (David Colin Jr.) move into a house which Dora owns but has stood empty since the suicide of Dora’s former husband Carlo and her subsequent breakdown which resulted in a stay in a psychiatric facility. Pilot Bruno loves the place because it’s close to the airport and it seems to be the perfect environment in which their kid will thrive.

Of course, strange things occur almost as soon as they’ve picked the ideal spot to place the sofa. Marco starts to behave oddly and threateningly towards Dora, as if possessed by the spirit of Carlo. Dora hears noises all around the house and is plagued by nightmarish hallucinations. Is the long-buried trauma of her past coming back to destroy her in supernatural form or is it all in her head?

Mario Bava’s final film (with son Lamberto on assistant director duty) is a triumph of atmosphere and simple, practical effects carried off with aplomb, including a jump scare for the ages which is all down to timing and the correct camera angle. Shock is, in many ways, the antithesis to the baroque stylings of his earlier seventies efforts A Bay Of Blood and Lisa And The Devil. Although the plot could lend itself to such a treatment, there’s a more sober approach at work in its tale of a woman driven to the brink of madness.

Also known as Beyond The Door II because of the possession element of the story, this shouldn’t exist as a footnote to the lurid, Juliet Mills-starring Exorcist rip-off. As ridiculously entertaining as that movie was, Shock operates on a different level entirely, playing even its most outlandish sequences with a dramatic weight that adds conviction to scenes that would raise laughs instead of chills in less experienced hands.

Central to the escalating terror is the performance of Daria Nicolodi and she is on impressive form here, having shone as Gianna – one of giallo’s most memorable characters if you ask me – in Argento’s Profondo Rosso a couple of years earlier. Her progression from enthusiastic homemaker and mother to brittle, nerve-shredded spectre of herself is both sympathetic and gripping.

One thing Italian horrors should always be congratulated upon is the casting of the creepiest child actors around and David Colin Jr. is no exception here. It’s difficult to set a baseline for what exactly is normal for Marco as he’s unnerving from the very beginning, opening with a threat to Dora that he’ll have to kill her and moving on to have a pop at crashing a passenger aircraft Bruno is flying by means of a supernatural swing and snapshot (you’ll see what I mean what you watch the film).

The cast is an exceedingly small one, which means Shock doesn’t lapse into that old standby of having supporting characters blunder into the proceedings and end up dead due to their ignorance. The bulk of the 92-minute runtime is taken up with Dora being menaced by an increasingly familiar presence or nasty surprises in the furnishings (the razor blade hidden between the keys of the piano is somehow more horrible for being downplayed in terms of bloodshed). Despite the single-minded drive of the plot, very little of Shock feels repetitive, generating multiple methods of psychologically torturing poor Dora while hubby Bruno stands on the sidelines and suggests that she calms down.

Considering the intensifying shenanigans of the first hour, the final act doesn’t disappoint in any way, continuing to ramp up both the tension and the scares as our heroine fights for her life against a force she’s unable to truly comprehend, leading to a grisly conclusion and a moment which will always make me wince no matter now many times I watch this.

A fitting finale to a superb movie making career, Shock may not be Bava’s masterpiece but it’s still a thoroughly effective and memorable chiller which holds up exceptionally well because of its insistence on building suspense and crafting a waking nightmare through clever staging rather than piling on that often unconvincing 70s gore, although those occasional, bloody moments still hit the mark.

The nursery rhyme score is alarming, the use of sound and shadow is masterful and the visual tricks are often delightful (watch for the one with the blood and the rose petal). Some of the dream sequences may seem a touch hoary now but, for the most part, Shock holds up incredibly well. Even if it ends up as a good Mario Bava film rather than a classic one, a good Mario Bava film is head and shoulders above the best output of so many others. See it before a creepy kid shows up and starts making your life difficult.

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