Black Sunday (The Mask Of Satan)

1960, Italy

Director: Mario Bava

Written by: Nikolai Gogol (short story), Ennio De Concini, Mario Serandrei, Mario Bava (uncredited), George Higgins (English translation)

Produced by: Massimo De Rita

Starring: Barbara Steele, John Richardson, Andrea Checchi, Ivo Garrani

Genre: Horror

DVD Distributor: Anchor Bay/Starz Home Entertainment

Rating: Unrated

Running Time: 87 minutes

The best Italian horror movies are the ones you can watch with the sound off. That way, the brilliant visuals can be enjoyed without the bothersome distraction of dubbed dialogue that's on the same intellectual level as colouring book captioning. And Black Sunday is the best of the best in this subgenre, the film that launched the career of Mario Bava, the king of Italy’s Golden Age of Horror.  

Everything in this film is beautiful, from the cinematography to the sound design to its star, Barbara Steele. A veteran of European horror, Steele is one of the only scream queens with a malevolent edge to her sex appeal, like a serial killer who moonlights in stag pictures. In Black Sunday, she plays two roles that rely on this attractive duality, as a naïve princess and her ancestor Asa Vajda, a long-dead witch or possibly vampire. When some nosy academics accidentally drip blood on the vampire-witch’s tomb, Vajda’s corpse messily re-constitutes itself, an image roughly analgous to seeing head cheese being made in reverse, and she returns from the grave along with her former lover to take revenge upon her descendants.

The film is surprisingly gory, even by today’s standards. It doesn’t matter what decade you’re in, watching a spiked mask get driven into someone’s face with a mallet clenches a few muscles. The script is too simple to get overly ridiculous, though there are moments where it’s clear more attention was paid to the fog machine than the dialogue. But Bava’s trademark fluid camera and stunning cinematography more than make up for any flaws. The DVD’s crisp transfer is one of the best I’ve seen, giving the black and white images rich contrast and sharp definition. Even in this, his first official directorial effort, Bava’s visual style makes everything work, despite the script’s failings. You could probably even watch the film with the sound on.  

Anchor Bay’s must have DVD features audio commentary by author Tim Lucas, trailers, posters, stills, TV spots, and bios of both Mario Bava and Barbara Steele. The one issue I had is that the disc contains only the English version of the film. In the Italian version, Asa Vadja's henchman/lover is identified as her brother, which makes things significantly creepier.

Rating: 9 on 10

alkratina@comicbookbin.com