Kill, Baby... Kill!

A ghost story built around one indelible image: a small blonde girl with a white ball whose appearance means a death is coming. In a remote Carpathian village, a doctor investigates a series of impossible deaths, and Bava turns almost no budget into pure dread.

Fellini and Scorsese both borrowed from it, and the spiral-staircase sequence that folds back on itself is one of the most dreamlike passages in horror. The ghost child predates every creepy-kid film that followed.

Bava conjuring genuine nightmare out of fog, colour and a bouncing ball.