Rorschach & Black Lace
As I sat in the cinema last night, enjoying the spectacle of Watchmen as it flickered across the cinema screen, I was struck by a number of striking similarities between the character of Rorschach and the masked killer from Mario Bava’s stylish horror thriller from 1964 - Blood & Black Lace . Rorschach, a troubled vigilante, shares an undeniable visual companionship with the killer/s in Blood & Black Lace , spurned to bloody action by greed and lust. Their garbs are irrepressibly comparable. Fedora hat, leather trench coat, black leather gloves and a startlingly blank face mask. Killers in giallo films usually boast a host of repressed anxieties, often stemming from some trauma they had previously suffered, or from distinctly Freudian anxieties. Not only sharing visual similarities, the darkly troubled Rorschach also shares a few psychological traits with many a killer from the Italian subgenre. His character’s particular flashback scenes wouldn’t be out of place in any r...