“You have no reason to fear the dead. They sleep very soundly.”
Black Sunday (the film’s American title, although I prefer the pulpy, more direct translation) is a lurid, wicked phantasmagoria; an unflinching shadowplay of gothic horror. Unbelievably Mario Bava’s debut feature, the film demonstrates his supreme, preternatural command of craft and manipulation of mood. It is resolutely unflinching in its portrayal of violence and sexuality, quite shockingly so, given the timeframe. If the British Hammer films of the late ‘50s and ‘60s wear their artificiality on their sleeve, Black Sunday positively revels in this. I’m pretty sure every single scene is done in a soundstage, providing a surreal, cloistered atmosphere that’s palpable in every frame – the omnipresent fog smothering the landscape threatens to choke out any and all good feelings. The plot, which is taught and free of extraneous fat, concerns the centuries-old promise of a witch to gain revenge on her own family. It’s almost secondary, however, to the feast of visual delights on display – a baleful Barbara Steele, draped in ebony and lying prostrate in her tomb, beckoning the weak-willed with burning, manic eyes; her vampiric lover stalking the corridors of the ancestral castle, flames dancing off his deformed face… Bava is absolutely drunk on filmmaking here, and the result is a searing fairytale that is nailed into your brain as surely as the titular mask is affixed to our antagonists’ faces in the prologue.
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