In 2007 the writer/critic Tim Lucas published Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark. This massive tome, glossily produced, extensively illustrated, and over 1,100 pages long, has since been described, with some justification, as ‘one of the most impressive books ever to have been written about any director’ (Williams, 2011: 162). The end result of over thirty years’ research, Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark has served to underline, reinforce and possibly clinch once and for all Mario Bava's status as a major figure not merely in Italian horror cinema but in world horror as well. However, such status has been bestowed entirely retrospectively, for during his directorial career – which ran from 1960 through to the mid-1970s – Bava, while a respected figure in the Italian film industry, received little critical attention and was not generally known to the film-going public, either in his native Italy or elsewhere.

In Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark, Lucas ascribes this obscurity to Bava's own modesty and dislike of publicity. Notwithstanding the idiosyncrasies of personality, the national and generic contexts within which Bava operated were also not especially amenable to the promotion of the director as a key creative figure or as being in any other way of importance. Indeed, horror cinema as it existed internationally from the 1930s through to the 1970s produced few ‘star’ directors who generated any kind of critical following or whose names featured prominently in movie publicity. In their own distinctive ways James Whale, director of the horror classics Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), the self-publicising William Castle in the 1950s and 1960s, and (in as much as he was a horror director) Alfred Hitchcock were notable exceptions, but the majority of horror directors laboured unobtrusively behind the scenes. Often they were figures, like Bava, who had worked their way up through the film industry over a period of years or decades and, again like Bava, who did not restrict themselves to the horror genre but operated in a variety of other genres as well.