As the son of the legendary Mario Bava, Lamberto Bava has carved out a career of some prestige in his own right – helming the classic Italian shocker Demons (1985), and its 1986 sequel, alongside producer Dario Argento. In addition, the younger Bava has directed such cult favourites as the Italian slasher movie A Blade in the Dark (1983) and a remake of his father’s masterwork Black Sunday (1989). Soon to be returning with his latest offering Ghost Son, Calum Waddell caught up with Bava Junior for the following exclusive chat to celebrate the recent region 1 DVD releases of Demons 1 and 2.

Demons was one of the most successful Italian horror films of the 1980s – can you tell us how yourself and Dario Argento came to collaborate on the project?

Dario asked me if I had any ideas for a horror film and a writer called Dardano Sacchetti had recently come up with this story where these young people go to a cinema to see a movie. However, what happens on the screen eventually takes place in real life. Dario liked it and we worked on Demons for six months but at the end of the production we still didn’t have a title!

Dario called me one day and said, “We need a title now!” So I walked around my desk and my eyes looked over at my library where I had stored many of father’s books. One old book had the word “Demons” in the title. I told Dario, “Demons should be the name of the film” and Dario said, “Ah, very good, very good.”

Demons was renowned when it came out for featuring lots of gruesome special effects…

Yeah, we wanted the film to be exactly like it was. It is full of violence but the colour of the blood is not very realistic, you know? The film is full of jokes too – we even have a blind man going to the cinema! I don’t like violence in real life but in the movies it is fine.

Some critics said the film resembled an Italian version of Night of the Living Dead…

Well the influence was there but we did not want to just copy a famous American film. When we were thinking about Demons Dario, especially, didn’t want to make the creatures look like zombies. So we made them quick and nervous, almost like they were on drugs, and we went in that direction. It was meant to be as if they could represent something inside us – a different personality or something…

Can you tell me about working as Dario Argento’s assistant director on his classic films Inferno and Tenebrae?

With Dario I saw what was possible in filmmaking. He has complete control of his set. When you shoot with Dario you know that you are working on something very important. He really taught me how to work on a script – for Inferno he spent many months writing it. Sometimes he would throw stuff out and just start writing it all over again. It had to be perfect.

Were you happy to team up with Dario again on Demons 2?

Yeah, I wanted to do that. When we finished Demons we hoped that we had made a good film and when we did Demons 2 we knew that the previous film had been a big success all over the world. So we were given some more bucks – Demons was a low budget film, all the people who worked on it took very little money. With Demons 2 we had much more money for the mechanical and special effects. We didn’t have CGI back then so the effects cost a lot more money.

Demons 2 was also Asia Argento’s first film – did you think this young child actor would go on to be such a big star?

She was 11 when she did Demons 2 and I remember that when I was shooting with her I thought she was a very good actress. In fact it was the worst day of shooting in my life – we had to spend six hours setting up her first scene. It was a very difficult scene with the demons and her, and she had been waiting all this time, but when I said “action” she did her job and did it very well. I knew then that she would be a successful actress.

Your latest film Ghost Son, which stars John Hannah and Pete Postlethwaite, has received some favourable reviews at its film festival showings. What can you tell us about it?

Ghost Son is an original story of mine – I started to think about the story many years ago when I went to the cinema and saw the movie Ghost. I wanted to know what happened after the end of that film. So Ghost Son is a love story but it is also a very tense horror film – it is about a man who dies and his girlfriend is pregnant with his baby. The man then finds a way to come back from the dead… The atmosphere of the film is very oppressive but there is no blood and gore. It is very different from Demons.

Do you have a favourite from the films you have made? And do you also have a favourite from your dad’s vast repertoire?

I think that, of all my films, Demons is my favourite – from my father’s work it would be Black Sabbath or Bay of Blood… When you watch Bay of Blood today it doesn’t look as if it was made back in the 1970s.

You were the assistant director on Bay of Blood. How did you feel when the Friday the 13th series came along and copied many of its elements?

Well, Friday the 13th is just one of many films that have copied it. Actually, I was happy because when someone makes something, based on your own work, that is a big success all over the world it means that you have also made something great!

Demons and Demons 2 are out now on DVD (region 1). Click here to read the review.