45 Years Later: Lamberto Bava's Macabre

So, just a little note before I jump into this one: I absolutely love Italian horror, but I especially love it when it just goes totally bonkers and takes me for a ride that I could not have possibly expected, even after watching thousands of horror films in my many, many years on this Earth. Like, if you tell me that a movie is about an ancient curse and an Italian filmmaker decides that some random neighborhood cat has summoned aliens that have created a new breed of zombies that want to eat people only wearing purple pants, then yeah, I’m all in.

That being said, Lamberto Bava’s directorial debut Macabre is definitely a wickedly subversive slice of Italian horror that subverts any expectations you may possibly have going into it, and I totally adore it, rough edges and all.

Before I discovered Macabre back in 2020, the only Lamberto Bava-helmed horror films that I had watched were Demons and Demons 2, which most fans know are totally banana pants viewing experiences (in a good way, of course). But even if you have some sense of who Lamberto Bava is as a storyteller, it still cannot fully prepare you for everything he delivers in Macabre, as it feels like this audacious fever dream that only a filmmaker with the last name Bava could get away with making.