Kino will release the U.S. AIP Cut of Black Sunday on Blu-ray on Feb 24. A previous Blu-ray of the original version was released in 2012.
Horror cold openings don’t come any finer than the blast of terror which welcomes the audience to the world of Black Sunday. Delightfully portentous narration regales moviegoers with the grim legend of Asa Vajd (Barbara Steele, at her most otherworldy beautiful), who was put to death for practicing witchcraft, condemned by her own brother. While the witch declares her undying devotion to Satan and her plan to one day return from the dead and wreak terrible vengeance, a great gargoyle-ian mask, fitted with extra-long nails is fitted to her face.
And then a big man in an executioner’s hood takes up a Mjolnir-looking hammer and slams the mask home on the witch’s face, cascades of blood erupting from the eyes and mouth.
Welcome to Mario Bava. Welcome to Black Sunday.
Black Sunday, originally released in 1960 and now on Blu-ray thanks to Kino Classics, was a sizable hit in Italy and America (where it was recut and dubbed by Roger Corman’s AIP). It was Bava’s first directorial credit, following a celebrated career as a cinematographer where he garnered a reputation for being a man who could rescue troubled productions.
Bava would become immortalized in the genre canon thanks to a career which included Planet of the Vampires (to which Alien owes an impossible debt), Black Sabbath (the greatest horror anthology film ever), and Twitch of the Death Nerve (which codified the slasher film structure, so much so that the Friday the 13th series lifted a number of kills shot-for-shot), along with numerous others.
Black Sunday was where it all began, though, and the film carries both a master’s touch and a newcomer’s shortcomings. Thankfully, the film is every bit the giddy rush of horror that it was on original release, but you can also see the places where Bava would refine his approach to a razor’s edge.
Once we move past the prologue and into the film proper, the focus falls on John Richardson as Dr. Andre Gorobec, the sort of vanilla-on-vanilla lead that Bava and Corman would use again and again in their period horror pictures. Gorobec is travelling through the Undisclosed European Country countryside with Dr. Thomas Kruvajan (Andrea Checchi) when they stumble across Asa the witch’s keep. There are number of spells and wards in place to keep her from arising, but, this being a horror movie, our dumbass nonbelivers do everything wrong and accidentally awaken the witch.
(Sidenote: I normally hate the “witch-hunters catch actual witches” subgenre of horror, given that it recasts brutal mass-murders as a fun fantasy, but Black Sunday does not, for a moment, exist in the real world, so its invocation of witches works much better than in similar modern films.)
Bava’s script, inspired by mid-19th century Russian short story “Viy,” takes an awful lot of time to get going, leaving much of the film’s 90 minute runtime feeling like set-up to a quick payoff (Corman’s films also often had this same structural feature). After the doctors awaken Asa, there’s a lot of time spent on the summoning of her undead servant, and some business with Asa’s descendants, including Katia (Steele again), who will fall in love with Gorobec because that’s just what women do in these movies.
The script labors to get everyone in motion, though it ends up stranding the characters that should be the leads to the outside of the main action for much of the movie. Asa is slowly regenerating and requires blood, so she has her undead servant bring her victims that she can entrance and ensnare; while these sequences are often creepy, the film struggles to get momentum going in the middle sections. You are constantly waiting for either Gorobec or Katia or anyone to take some initiative on the whole undead-murderers thing, but it’s a good while into the film before things really kick into gear. Some of these narrative shortcomings may be the result of cutting, as Kino is releasing the AIP cut, which trimmed brief sequences of gore and references to an incestuous relationship.
But it almost seems immaterial to lambast Black Sunday for its script. They say you shouldn’t read The Bible for its prose, and neither should you watch a Mario Bava horror film for its story structure. Bava was a visual genius, unsurpassed in his ability to craft waking nightmares onto celluloid, transporting audiences to Gothic universes which moved with a dream logic all their own.
Blu-ray affords you the ability to drink in that splendor on a whole new level. Bava’s background as a photographer afforded him the time to refine his approach to visuals, and he came to his debut with guns blazing. There’s not a frame of Black Sunday that isn’t a work of art, with Bava’s expert use of black and white, light and shadow, transforming backlots into haunted dungeons and malevolent forests, always gripped by endless swaths of fog. Scenes like the one featuring the undead Javuto (Arturo Dominici) arriving to spirit away Kruvajan seem lifted pure from a twilight unconscious.
Bava would only grow more confident as he worked (and later films’ usage of color would only strengthen his fever-dream aesthetic [nothing in Black Sabbath looks even remotely sane, but it works perfectly for a feature length haunted house ride]), and he would also be lucky enough to find casts which could better play to the material. Besides Steele and Dominici, everyone in Black Sunday is playing it pretty straight, while the undead duo get to really play up their otherworldliness. It’s also possible that I was distracted from their acting given that both spend 90% of their scenes in make-up that makes them look both decayed, and as if they had a dozen railroad spikes recently put through their heads. That’s a distracting thing.
Much like it was for Bava, Black Sunday was an indicator of bigger things for Steele. She would go on to Scream Queen immortality with later collaborations with AIP, and enter into celluloid canon with appearances in films like 8½. While apparently not the easiest person to work with (she apparently refused to come to set because she believed Bava was using a special type of film that would record her with no clothes on) Steele radiates star charisma, those giant eyes of her capturing both trembling fear or hissing evil.
While Black Sunday’s age and flaws are readily apparent, its status as a horror classic is inarguable. With gorgeous Gothic vistas and sequences of still shocking gore and terror, Mario Bava’s debut film still carries an electric charge of delightful fear. It’s the kind of serious-but-fun horror that is in such short supply these days, the kind of film where you can almost hear the director cackling just off camera as he introduces more and more ghouls to jump up and terrify the gathered crowd. There may be better horror films, but there are criminally few that are this beautiful, and this much fun.