Hang on, I thought vampires were meant to be afraid of garlic?

There’s something deliciously hypnotic about Planet of the Vampires (Terrore nello spazio, if you prefer its more evocative Italian title). Directed by Mario Bava – maestro of the macabre – this 1965 sci-fi horror hybrid stands as a shining example of Italian genre cinema at its most resourceful. With an eye for atmospheric dread and a flair for visual storytelling that belies the film’s modest budget, Bava created something not only remarkable in its own right but profoundly influential.

Set in the distant future, Planet of the Vampires follows the crew of two starships, Argos and Galliot, responding to a distress signal from an uncharted planet. Upon landing, the crews experience a malevolent force that drives them to madness, resulting in violence and death. The survivors soon discover that an ancient alien species inhabits the planet, using the dead as hosts to further their plans of escape.

Though Ridley Scott and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon played coy about direct inspirations, the parallels between Planet of the Vampires and Alien are far too striking to be dismissed as mere coincidence. Bava’s mastery of creating tension and fear through visual design – the barren, fog-shrouded planet, the looming presence of ancient alien structures, and the ominous suggestion of something unknowably hostile – clearly prefigures the work Scott and his team would undertake in Alien.

One need only compare the discovery of the fossilised alien creature in Alien‘s derelict ship to the scenes of the astronauts in Planet of the Vampires encountering the remnants of a long-dead alien race. Both sequences exude a sense of vast, cosmic horror, where the ruins of a superior civilisation are not symbols of wonder but harbingers of doom. Bava’s minimalist but atmospheric production design – achieved through a masterful use of lighting, forced perspective, and set dressing – laid the groundwork for the unnerving environments that H R Giger would later flesh out with biomechanical precision.

Not that Bava’s work here is entirely without influences of its own. The staging of the spaceship interiors and the film’s exploration of isolation and psychological tension can trace its ancestry to earlier science fiction films like Forbidden Planet, albeit while amplifying the gothic dread through his distinctive visual artistry. By viewing it through this lens, Bava’s movie stands at a fork in the genre road, signposting an alternative to the optimistic utopian vision of Star Trek, leading to the darker, dystopian cynicism of Alien.

It’s not just the atmosphere that echoes through Alien. Planet of the Vampires explores themes of bodily possession and the sinister violation of human autonomy – ideas that would be reimagined in Alien‘s parasitic xenomorph lifecycle. In Bava’s film, the alien menace doesn’t merely kill its victims but co-opts their corpses, transforming them into agents of its will. This macabre conceit, while handled with pulpy simplicity here, contains the germ of the chilling body horror that Alien would perfect.

Notably, Planet of the Vampires has its roots in Italian science fiction literature. The film is loosely based on the short story One Night of 21 Hours by Italian author Renato Pestriniero. Published in 1960, Pestriniero’s tale is a more introspective exploration of paranoia and isolation as a space crew grapples with the oppressive darkness of a planet where night lasts for 21 hours. The horror in Pestriniero’s story is less about external alien forces and more about the psychological breakdown of the crew as fear and distrust fester. There are no vampiric aliens in the short story – the monsters are the shadows of the characters’ own minds.

Bava and screenwriters Ib Melchior and Antonio Román took considerable liberties with the source material, turning a subdued psychological thriller into a visually arresting blend of gothic horror and pulp science fiction. However, the heart of Pestriniero’s story – the existential dread that comes from confronting an alien environment that warps your sense of reality – remains intact. The adaptation underscores how Italian genre cinema often approached literary sources: as a thematic foundation to build something more visually expressive and operatic. Instead of a faithful adaptation, Bava crafted an entirely new experience steeped in the themes of dread and survival.

Filmed at Cinecittà Studios, Rome’s hallowed home of Italian cinema, Planet of the Vampires is as Italian in its DNA as it is universal in its themes. The film’s theatrical lighting and bold use of colour lend it a dreamlike quality that’s uniquely European. Bava’s background in painting shines through in every frame, with compositions that evoke classical art as much as science fiction. This visual richness is what makes the film endure, even as its stilted dialogue and stiff performances occasionally feel like relics of a bygone era.

Planet of the Vampires is much more than just a footnote in genre history. It is a foundational text, a visionary work that seeded ideas and aesthetics that would flourish in films like Alien and beyond. For lovers of Italian cinema or aficionados of sci-fi horror, it remains a haunting, evocative exploration of terror among the stars – and a testament to Mario Bava’s enduring genius.