Black Sunday
In the early 1960s, Gothic horror was all the rage, from Britain's Hammer films to Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe adaptations in the US. Mario Bava's Black Sunday saw Italy enter this market with a film that is still one of the best.
How Bava updated traditional horror tropes can be seen in the classic opening sequence, where a witch – played by the striking Barbara Steele, with her large dark eyes set in a deathly pale face – is executed. You get the usual robed figures, burning torches and foggy atmospherics. It almost seems cosy, until the inquisitors brand her flesh in close-up then brutally hammer a spiked metal mask into her face. It's still shocking to see, and while the rest of the movie doesn't offer up anything quite as strong, the impact from the opening is felt throughout. This was Bava's first film as director and he uses every trick in the horror book. The movie runs like a gothic horror checklist, ticking off foggy graveyards, decrepit castles, vampires, bats, frogs and wealthy old families driven to despair and madness by grief and guilt. It also looks superb on Blu-ray. Also, this edition includes two cuts of the movie, another film partially directed by Bava (I Vampiri) and nearly an hour of Bava trailers. It's a great introduction to Italian horror from an era when their film-making industry was so on the ball that even their B-movies could end up being works of art.
Blu-ray & DVD, Arrow
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