Compared to Hollywood, Italian cinema is more a matter of craftsmanship than industry. Genre films, in particular, have typically been disregarded and had to struggle with dramatically slim budgets. Mario Bava was probably the most outstanding example: on many an occasion he managed to compensate the lack of a supporting creative industry with his own creative energy. 2014 marks the centennial of Bava's birth and the paper aims at illustrating his deftness in manufacturing very low-budget and yet ingenious films that have eventually come to exercise a seminal influence world-wide. The case study is a comparative stylistic analysis of excerpts from Bay of Blood (Reazione a catena, 1971), an outstanding model for the American slasher films of the 1980s, with Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), a quasi-remake slasher by the Hollywood creative Industry (Paramount Pictures) which replicated some of Bava's set-pieces almost verbatim.