Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960) isn't just a horror film classic, it's one of the all-time greats in any film genre. Also known as The Mask of Satan (the Italian title is La Maschera del Demonio), the film seductively lures viewers into its web before pouncing on them. Rather than creating a single-minded exercise in terror, Bava shows all the delicate visual sensibilities of a Josef von Sternberg coupled with the more extreme aspects of Hammer films of the late sixties like Dracula - Prince of Darkness (1966). Admirers of the film include Martin Scorsese, Clive Barker, Joe Dante and Tim Burton. In fact, Burton told Urban Cinefile that "Mario Bava's Black Sunday is one of the first films that made me understand the power of cinema in the sense of images as part of the story." The US release of Black Sunday was toned down and poorly redubbed but TCM is showing the superior European cut in the vastly improved English language version with the original music. (Like most Italian films from this period, Black Sunday was shot without sound so even its Italian release was dubbed.)

Black Sunday opens with a group of black-robe inquisitors preparing to burn a suspected witch at the stake. If that wasn't bad enough, the witch is first subjected to having a bronze mask with spikes nailed to her face. Her assistant also receives the same treatment. Ouch! The film then jumps ahead a couple of hundred years to the 19th century as two travelers make their way through a dank, fog-laden landscape. They never quite reach their destination, however, and are instead waylaid by a beautiful princess, a chapel with a windowed coffin, suspicious villagers and worse complications.

The plot of Black Sunday is based quite loosely on Nikolai Gogol's short story "The Vij" which oddly enough also inspired another stylish classic, the 1967 Russian film Vij. However, viewers who didn't already know this would be extremely unlikely to connect the two films. Perhaps this is due to the four screenwriters who worked on Black Sunday though lead actress Barbara Steele recalls being handed pages of the script but never the entire screenplay. Steele also recalled what it was like to work with Bava in an interview with Tim Lucas for Video Watchdog. She said he was "very quiet, very intimate, very low-key, very one-to-one. He wasn't at all highly-charged like most Italian directors - very feverish, you know. He was warm and delicate with us....This was his first film, and he was trying to direct and be cinematographer at the same time. Also, he was deathly ill, as was everybody else. We were all dying during the shooting of Black Sunday. It was freezing! We shot for three or four weeks in December; there was no heat, and it was one of those arctic Roman winters. Everyone had some terrible virus and we were totally asphyxiated by all the dry ice! It's just as well that the film was dubbed later, because everyone was utterly nasal." Despite these trying circumstances, it probably contributed to making the completed film even more intense.

Steele had a uniquely sensual and haunting screen presence, yet she's usually labeled with the somewhat derogatory term of "cult actress." Her appearance in Black Sunday was something of a fluke; she left the United States after walking off the set of the Elvis Presley Western Flaming Star (1960) and traveled to Europe where she auditioned for other roles. Bava spotted her during casting for another film and realized she was perfect for Black Sunday. She later appeared in about fifty films, most notably Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963), David Cronenberg's Shivers (1975), Louis Malle's Pretty Baby (1978) and Joe Dante's Piranha (1978).

* TCM will be showing a new English language version of the film produced by Alfredo Leone which utilizes both the original Roberto Nicolosi score and the one produced for the American release version by Les Baxter.

Producer: Massimo De Rita, Lou Rusoff (US version)
Director: Mario Bava
Screenplay: Mario Bava, Ennio De Concini, Mario Serandrei, based on a story by Nikolai Gogol
Art Direction: Giorgio Giovannini
Cinematography: Mario Bava
Editing: Mario Serandrei
Music: Robert Nicolosi, Les Baxter (US version)
Cast: Barbara Steele (Katie Vajda/Princess Asa Vajda), John Richardson (Dr. Andre Gorobec), Andrea Checchi (Dr. Thomas Kruvajan), Ivo Garrani (Prince Vajda), Arturo Dominici (Javutich/Javuto).
BW-83m.

By Lang Thompson