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Barbara Steele as the reanimated vampiric witch in Mario Bava's Black Sunday.

"Now we are going to make a movie . . . and when we finish, we’ll all have much to be ashamed of!”
Italian giallo maestro Mario Bava

Mario Bava’s debut feature film recently popped up in my Amazon Prime queue, and I waited until after midnight Saturday to watch the 1960 Black Sunday. Some consider it to be Bava’s masterpiece.

Despite this being the first feature where he got director credits – he had a number of uncredited directorial efforts that preceded this film – he had a long history as cinematographer and master of special effects. I’ve seen references to him being considered the MacGyver of special effects artists.

He gets director and cinematographer credits for Black Sunday, and it looks beautiful in glorious black and white.  

Bava once said: “In a horror film, lighting is 70% of the effectiveness. It’s essential in creating the atmosphere.” You see exactly what he means in Black Sunday, which was filmed with lots of smoke and chiaroscuro creepiness.

This was also the horror starting point for English actress Barbara Steele, although the credits drop the last e in her last name.

Steele, now 86 and known as the “Queen of all Scream Queens” for all the horror roles that came her way after this, appears in a dual role – as the witch Asa, who, in the dramatic opening, undergoes a branding and painful facial before being burned at the stake in 17th century Moldavia, and Princess Katia, her descendant 200 years later, where the majority of the movie takes place.

I’ve heard about this movie for years and always I’ve known it as Black Sunday, but its original title was The Mask of Satan, and that is the title in the credits, with Black Sunday below it in much smaller parenthetical type.

The credits tell us the movie is based on a story by Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol, however, the connection between Black Sunday and Gogol’s 1835 story “The Viy” truly escapes me. The beginning of An American Werewolf in London is closer to the beginning of Gogol’s “The Viy” than Black Sunday – three students in a foreign land, seek refuge at a remote farmhouse owned by a witch, who later that night rides one of them like a horse. 

That seems like a viable horror movie, but none of that is in Black Sunday. Gogol’s story was made into a more faithful version in the Soviet Union in 1967.

The version on Prime features the original soundtrack by Roberto Nicolosi, an Italian jazz bassist and band leader. When the movie was acquired for U.S. distribution by American International Pictures (the home of Roger Corman), AIP owners Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson ordered significant changes, including a new score by their house composer Les Baxter. They thought Nicolosi’s score sounded too Italian. It seemed a very competent score to me and though I listened, I heard nothing that sounded Italian – not a mandolin or accordion anywhere.

AIP was founded in 1955, and Black Sunday became its highest grossing film to date. It was often found on a double bill with another AIP movie by Corman, Little Shop of Horrors.

The movie opens with a voiceover: “In the 17th century, Satan was abroad on the earth. And great was the wrath against those monstrous beings thirsty for human blood, for whom tradition has given the name vampire … ”

But what those “blood-devouring assassins” have to do with this movie about a 17th century witch revived by a drop of blood from an unsuspecting professor, well, hmmm … I am lost again.

We first see 17th century Steele being branded with the mark of Satan, an S. You have to wonder why the branding is necessary because ultimately, she is to be burned at the stake. 

Her tortuous end is being overseen by her own brother, who the witch curses before “the mask of Satan” is applied – a metal mask that fits on her face with long spikes. Then a muscular, hooded executioner carrying a massive wooden hammer pounds the mask into her face, and the pyre she is perched on is set ablaze. But it starts to rain and extinguishes the fire.

When a pair of 19th century travelers accidentally discover the tomb of “the witch of the old legend,” they find a window on her tomb, and a stone cross above that. The prof explains that she cannot escape as long as she looks out on the cross.

When the professor’s companion goes back to the carriage, the professor is attacked by a giant bat. While fighting it off with his walking stick, he smashes the witch’s window. Finally he shoots the bat. Seeing the tomb window broken, the professor decides to remove the mask from her face, and in so doing cuts his hand. A single drop of his blood falls on the witch, which partially revives her. She needs more blood to revive her enough to possess the body of her doppelganger descendant.

In a mad carriage ride that rivals the one taken by Jonathan Harker in Dracula, the professor is taken back to the witch’s tomb so she can have all of his blood.

I know that all sounds very vampiric, but she is a witch, a witch in major retribution mode. OK, so I’ve never heard of vampire witches. 

When it comes right down to it, this movie is more about atmosphere and mood than great acting and flawless storytelling. Bava is a master of mood in this visually stunning gothic horror tale. Lots of dark and stormy skies to scan.

Bava reportedly was moved to make this film by the recent success of the Hammer horror films, such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958) and The Mummy (1959). But Black Sunday owes as much to German Expressionism as it does the Hammer horrors.

Funny, then, that the film was banned in Britain until 1968 when certain scenes were cut and it was retitled Revenge of the Vampire (there’s that vampire again!).