Hatchet for the Honeymoon

John Harrington runs a bridal fashion house and is a self-confessed madman who kills women in wedding dresses because each murder brings him closer to remembering a trauma from his own childhood, which he can only recover by killing again.

Bava tells almost the whole film from the killer's point of view, in voice-over, decades before that became a giallo staple, and the effect is a genuinely uncanny portrait of a man narrating his own compulsion with complete calm.

It is one of his stranger films, closer to a psychological study than a mystery, and the twist, that his murdered wife's ghost is visible to everyone but him, is a fine idea.

Stephen Forsyth plays Harrington as blandly handsome and utterly hollow.

It is a minor Bava with a genuinely original structure and a dreamlike final act.