Black Sunday / Mario Bava (1960)
Black Sunday (originally released as La Maschera del Demonio or The Mask of Satan).
This movie hits hard. In the cold open, we're introduced to the presence of Satan, witches and hooded executioners. The punishment of a witch with branding and a spiked mask hammered to her face got the film banned in the U.K. and stuns me, still.
This may be among the best deployed use of blackness in a film's composition, second to the original Nosferatu (1922) and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The contrast drives the mood, the framing, the fear from the opening frame to the closing credits. Bava and production designer, Giorgio Giovannini create deep dimension with minimalized sets, fog machines and a small selection of judiciously applied lights, to amazing effect. His gothic styling creates an atmosphere immediately that holds for the first sixty minutes of the film. Dark, brooding, ethereal. It feels certain that something is happening in the darkness of every frame.
Speaking of effects, they're handled with nice touches. The regrowth of the witches eyes, for one, is a series of effects that builds effectively over several scenes. Barbara Steele (Shivers, 8 1/2) is captivating as both Princess Asa Vajda and Katia Vajda. Her eyes steal and hold the camera's attention.
Bava isn't too interested in the lore of the witch or the details of the story. In Black Sunday, witches and vampires are nearly interchangeable. The cursed witch Asa Vajda is reanimated by spilled blood and people killed by the witches are found with bite marks in their necks. But the plot isn't the draw here. The set design and baroque excess is.
Steele's eyes, represented graphically on the poster, are much more powerful on film than any illustrator's rendering.
As for plot, a cursed witch is accidentally awakened and attacks her lineage to get revenge on the brother who killed her and on her entire lineage. The whats and hows are clumsy, as if Bava may have been annoyed by the distraction to the production design. The sequence in which Dr. Choma Kruvajan (Andrea Checchi) awakens the witch entails him firing a pistol in surprise at a bat and cutting his hand on broken glass. Don't think about it too hard.
Once reanimated, Asa (and Steele's performance generally) is presented as an exposed seductress. Her evil is explicitly connected with her sensuality and bodily allure rather than the general malevolence of a witch. This taps into classic horror tropes equating female sexual power with monstrousness, contrasted against Katia's (also Steele) chaste and "pure" counterpart.
Black Sunday is a revenge story at its core. The sins of the past infect the present. A witch executed centuries ago returns to claim the bloodline of her descendants, collapsing past and present, ancestor and descendant, into one body. With Steele in the roles of both the witch Asa and her virtuous descendant Katia, the virgin/whore trope, along with themes of decay and resurrection, and the instability of identity are presented within the text and the subtext.
The family lives in a castle build on and amidst the ruins of the last generation. Early in the film, the body of the witch is presented as distant from the castle and later as accessible through a hidden door in the main hall of the castle. In many ways, the film is a bridge between the pioneering work of Universal monsters and Hammer horror and the wave of non-traditional and giallo horror Bava became more closely associated with.
Years before his giallos The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace Bava was experimenting with some of the genre's core elements here. He lets the fog, decayed architecture, and elaborate lighting setups dominate scenes even when they may complicate an element of the story. The instinct to let the frame itself be the attraction, rather than just serve the story, is connected direct throughline to the visual power of the giallo.
Black Sunday endures not because of its barely existent story, but in spite of it. Tug lightly at the threads of the plot's logic: a stray bullet, a broken lantern, blood dripping into an eye socket at exactly the wrong moment. It all unravels. What is left is one of horror's great triumphs of atmosphere over narrative. Bava doesn't seem to care whether you can diagram the curse or the rules of the witch's return. He and the writers may not have ever defined the rules. He's much more interested in the fog pressing against the castle walls and the dark corners of every frame. On that count, the film is a total success.
It's tempting to call this a director's debut announcing a new visual language. It's more of baroque, stylistic first step to the horror Bava would formalize a few years later. The eyes that hold the frame, the violence staged as composition rather than plot mechanics, the sense that the image itself is the point. All of it is giallo in embryo, years before Bava had a name for what he was building, and make Bloody Sunday worth a second and third watch.
Of course, none of this works without Steele. Asked to be both curse and cure, monster and ingénue. Steel is the film's real subject. Evil and desire, punishment and beauty, are not opposites here but the same thing wearing two faces. Her stunning face. The virgin/whore doubling is blunt and dated, but rendered with such conviction and striking visual clarity that it still lands.
Black Sunday isn't a film you watch for its story. It may work just as well with the sound off. This is a film you watch to be unsettled by shadow, held by a stare, and reminded that horror's oldest trick–dread built from darkness and restraint–hasn't been improved on nearly as much as we'd like to think in the last 65 years.
Key scene
Spoilers below.
The introduction and executioner. The film opens on a tribunal with hooded figures, torches, a raised platform. This immediately establishes the film's visual vocabulary of concealment and representation of virtue as a function of class. Asa is positioned below/beneath her judges, then raised up for punishment, a spatial hierarchy that recurs throughout the film whenever power is being exercised over her. The crowd is kept largely in shadow or off-frame, which has the effect of making the condemnation feel less like public spectacle and more like a closed ritual. It's cold, procedural, liturgical.
Branded and bloodied, Asa's vows return and vengeance on her brother's bloodline. She speaks directly to camera essentially foretelling the entire film in the cold open. This establishes the structure. We know the curse will activate, there is no mystery. But the dread of waiting to see the promise unfold provides an engine wholly different from a whodunit and it's part of why the film can afford to be so unhurried with its pacing later.
Own it
My Letterboxd review