Black Sunday (originally The Mask of the Demon) has been on my to-watch list for years, partly because of its place in horror movie history as Mario Bava’s official directorial debut, but mostly because of its amazing poster. I finally watched it last night1As is a common theme lately, as part of my break-up with Amazon, as I try to watch as much as I can on Amazon Prime Video before my subscription expires, and it’s easy to see why it was so influential.
I’m by no means enough of a movie buff, especially when it comes to classic horror, to be able to put the movie sufficiently in context. Honestly, I’m more of a fan of the overall aesthetic of classic horror than the movies themselves. Often, it feels like trying to dig through the detritus of censorship, dated performances, and special effects that are still in their infancy, just to find a few moments that feel relevant to modern audiences.
(An exception is The Bride of Frankenstein, which I’d always dismissed as another famous-for-being-famous relic of the classic Universal Monsters days, until I actually watched it and realized that it’s a straight-up masterpiece).2Not to mention being even more of an influence on Young Frankenstein than the original Frankenstein, like I’d always assumed.
But despite all of the aspects that make Black Sunday feel too dated to be relevant — the melodramatic and often nonsensical plot, the weird dubbing throughout, the makeup that sometimes seems more comical than horrific — there are several shots and scenes that stand out like nothing I’d seen before.
Notably, its gruesome opening sequence, which shows an unrepentant witch cursing her inquisitor brother before having the spike-filled “mask of Satan” nailed onto her face. It suggests far more than it shows, but what it shows is brilliant: the brutal spikes coming straight for the camera, a POV shot of the executioner wielding a massive hammer, and a side shot of the hammer pounding the mask into place. I found a pretty good video from the “History of Horror” channel putting Black Sunday in context with the rest of Mario Bava’s work, in particular pointing out that the more shocking moments were part of Italian cinema reacting to a long period of censorship under Mussolini and after WWII.
To me, it set the tone that anything could happen, especially when I considered that Psycho came out in the same year, and I’ve been hearing for years how shocking and scandalous it was for that movie to even show a toilet.
Not to spoil anything, but the rest of the movie feels much more conventional. We discover that its pseudo-vampires need to be killed via a spike through the left eye, which is never shown explicitly but is still traumatic for those of us especially sensitive to that kind of thing. For the most part, the creatures just seem to have some kind of skin condition. One of our vampires can only be recognized as such because his hair has turned white and he’s got a five o’clock shadow. I’d been expecting it all to be much more lurid, but overall it feels more like a few stand-out images tied together loosely by a traditional classic horror movie plot.
But some of those images are amazing. Princess Katja’s appearance, standing in the ruins of a chapel holding two black dogs, is one of the most famous. There are long sequences that feel like a big swing for a filmmaker in the late 50s, with pervasive darkness punctuated by small areas of light. In particular, there’s a pretty lengthy sequence of a man following a lantern-carrying guide through the dark catacombs underneath a castle, and the shots get darker and darker until we can see nothing but the light coming from the lantern itself.
My favorite shots, though, are just before that. A carriage has arrived to pick up one of our protagonists to take him to the castle. It’s full-on gothic. Solid black, led by two black horses driven by a partially-decomposing man-out-of-time all dressed in black. Black Sunday doesn’t use camera effects anywhere else that I could identify, but the shots of the carriage are done in slow motion. The horses gallop through a dense, pitch-black forest through fog, and it’s strikingly dream-like. Or more accurately, nightmare-like.
Mario Bava is often named as one of the progenitors — if not the creator — of giallo. I’m still not familiar enough with the genre to be making any blanket statements, but it feels as if the roots are here, even without the addition of lurid color.3Or maybe more accurately, even if the lurid colors here are pure black and bright white. Stories that fade into the background to allow strikingly stylistic images take prominence and become unforgettable.
