Kill, Baby… Kill! at 60: a coroner, an autopsy, and Mario Bava's reputation

2026 marks the 60th anniversary of Operazione paura, released in English as Kill, Baby… Kill!, a 1966 film widely considered Mario Bava's finest. Senses of Cinema notes the anniversary and the reputation it rests on; it also sketches the opening: the story is set in 1907, and it begins with a coroner, Dr. Eswai, arriving to carry out an autopsy in a small German village. That is a tidy gothic engine — an outsider with a professional reason to open a body in a place that presumably has reasons of its own for not wanting him there. The name Eswai suggests the film never quite lets you settle into the ordinary world it starts in, which is the sort of thing that keeps a horror picture alive six decades on.