"One of my favorite filmmakers is an Italian director named Mario Bava. His most famous movies have titles like Black Sunday and Black Sabbath and all that, but the one that really was astonishing at the time was a picture called Blood and Black Lace, which is one of the most gorgeously lit Technicolor movies I’ve ever seen. And it’s a whodunit kind of thing — a murderer in a fashion house and models are being killed in various gruesome ways. This is the early ’60s when you could get away with a lot more in the way of explicitness than you had been able to before, and these movies still basically played grindhouses. But it’s such a beautiful movie to look at, and the juxtaposition of beauty and death is really perverse in it. It runs through all his works, but in this particular movie, which I think is one of Tarantino’s favorites, it really comes to the fore. It’s a very entertaining picture, and very violent. Bava was completely unknown when he was actually alive. Almost nobody except, you know, the most extreme film buffs ever saw those movies. But now, as often happens to people when it’s too late for them to enjoy it, he’s now revered, and people see his movies who didn’t even know they existed before."

"Growing up on movies on TV, part of the Universal package was a very, very weird and creepy movie called The Black Cat. Which is ostensibly based on Edgar Allen Poe’s story, but wasn’t. It’s a devil-worshiping movie with Karloff and Lugosi, and it’s directed by a guy named Edgar Ulmer, who was a very promising European director whose career ran afoul of the fact that he slept with the boss’s niece or something like that and got, basically, blackballed by the major studios. But before he did that, he was able to make this very, very dark and very dreamlike horror movie, which only runs about 65 minutes. It’s an art deco nightmare, and it’s got all these very perverse ideas and concepts running through it. It’s like watching somebody else’s bad dream. It’s really a wonderful picture. I mean, Karloff has given better performances. The Body Snatcher is probably his best performance outside of Frankenstein, and that was on my list, but between The Body Snatcher and The Black Cat, I have to go with The Black Cat, because it’s so off-beat and kind of unique. There aren’t a lot of other movies like it. The interesting thing is, now these movies are actually available to see. When I was growing up, you had to wait until two o’clock in the morning on Friday; they were going to run some movie, and if you didn’t watch it then, they weren’t gonna run it again for another year and a half or more. And you’d fall asleep anyway, you know. It was so hard to see these things. You had to really seek them out. The Mario Bava movies, I had to go to the lowest dives, the crappiest grindhouses, to see these things, and often the prints were all beat up. But now, all this stuff is available, and it looks great. I just don’t think film lovers realize what a paradise they’re living in right now. [laughs] For those of us who really had to go the distance to seek these things out, it was really quite arduous."