1960: Black Sunday

Black Sunday (Bava, 1960) 9/10

In 1960, two horror films were released which would change the shape of the genre. In Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock released Psycho, a stripped bare evocation in which sinister individuals and actions emerge from safe and ordinary settings. In Europe, forty-six year old special effects pioneer and cinematographer Mario Bava cast an entirely different spin on the medium.

Whereas Hitchcock's film was imbued with psychological tension and a quotidian mis-en-scene, Bava's film was an atmospheric paean to 30's Universal horror and Britain's emerging Hammer Studios synthesis of sex and sadism. Utilizing a short story by legendary Ukranian author Nikolai Gogol entitled The Vij, Bava designed a period horror film in which visual aesthetics usurped the narrative as the film's crucial bearer of motifs, symbols and themes.

Beginning in the mid-17th century with the ritual burning of a Moravian princess Asa (Barbara Steele) and her brother Javutich (Arturo Dominici) for their indulgence in satanic and incestuous practices, Bava's film explores themes of broken families, deception and uncertainty. As punishment for their crimes, the pair are not only burned at the stake, but are given the infamous distinction of having the bronze Mask of Satan nailed to their faces. However, the event is falted by a storm, which prevents the dissolution of their evil souls.

Forwarding two centuries later, Bava's camera captures a pair of doctors travelling to a conference by carriage. When the wheel loosens from the carriage, the elder doctor Tomas Kruvajan (Andrea Checchi) tries to satisfy his curiousity in the dark arts by entering an abandoned crypt. There he and his assistant Dr. Andre Gorobec (John Richardson) unwittingly break a stone cross atop the coffin of the condemned witch Asa. With the cross now broken, the witch can now return to fulfill her promise to seek vengence on future generations of her family including the current nobles, including Katia (Barbara Steele) who bears a striking license to Asa.

Despite its low-budget status, Mario Bava creates a film brimming with visual flair. Masking his sets in atmospheric waves of fog and spectacular incogruent rays of light, Bava demonstrates his considerable skill as a cinematographer throughout Black Sunday . Using simple camera tricks involving the dimming of lights and exploring scenes in long, slippery movements, Bava is able to impress a non-existent epic status to his audience.

Via his camera, Bava supplies Black Sunday with an array of peculiar motifs. The two most noticeable ideas are the symbolism related to eyes and crucifixes. The film's infamous Mask of Satan offers its wearers only two solitary eye slits upon which their putrid irises are to gaze at the crucifixes which prevent their corporeal resurrection. During Kruvajan's attempt to injure a bat in the crypt, his temper results in the destruction of the protective cross. Later on, a priest reveals to Kruvajan's assistant Andre that the only way to destroy the ghoulish figures is through gouging their eyes with a stake: demonstrated in one of the film's most notorious visual shocks.

In several moments during the film, Bava's characters utilize crosses to save their souls from their zombified attackers, or in Katia's case would-be assassins. Repeatedly Bava also centers his camera on the fireplaces within the home of the elderly Prince Vajda (Ivo Garrini) to remind his audience of the failure of the 17th century witchhunters to burn Asa's body. The burning of one otherworldly character in particular who stumbles into the fire is done with a superb degree of menace.

The destruction of families is a key theme in Black Sunday. The sentencing and subsequent execution at the stake of Asa and Javutich by their brother is the first sign of this schismatic approach to family relations. Yet, as film historian Tim Lucas notes in his commentary for the film, the original Italian prints of Black Sunday note that Asa and Javutich are not only being executed for witchcraft, but also for incestuous relations. Asa's claim to seek revenge on future generations has resulted in bizarre events occuring on the day of her execution that have maimed or killed future family members.

Once resurrected from their eternal slumber, Asa and Javutich begin their quest to destroy their successors: often utilizing gullible third parties to do their bidding. The physical similarities between Asa and Katia allow for the former to try and deceive the film's mortal characters into believing she is the real Katia. Given the obtuse and awkward nature of Steele's Katia this is astutely realized by Bava in several lucid and perplexing sequences.

Through Steele's dual role as Asa and Katia, Bava is able to insert an aura of uncertainty into the viewer. The first time we see Katia is after Kruvajan breaks the stone cross across her ancestor's tomb. Adorned in black with two giant dogs, the viewer is initially tricked into believing she has immediately reconsolidated her corporeal self. The bewitching nature of Steele's Katia also adds an opaque nature to the film. The cryptic furrows of her brow and perplexed smiles often call into doubt her mortal existence due to Bava's doubling of his lead female protagonist.

Some scholars have claimed Bava intended these sequences to represent Steele's Asa emerging earlier into the picture, but their finalized presence imbues her character with a sense of hereditary iintrigue. In an era, when female horror villains were rare, Steele's portrayal of Asa is imbued with a sexual hunger and menace which would have been viewed as threatening to early Sixties audiences. Kruvajan's encounter with her is filled with a simultaneous sensation of attraction and repellence. Asa's punctured skin, lusty breathing and aggresive erotic necrophilia predates Linda Blair's Regan MacNeill in William Friedkin's The Exorcist by more than a decade.

In 1960, audiences were struck by two major concepts emerging from Black Sunday. The first is Bava's magisterial camerawork allowing for incredible layers of contrasted darkness and light, as well as an array of brilliant effects such as the supernatural carriage shot in slow motion to add a Murnau-esque feeling of fear and wonder. The ambigiuous and otherworldly nature of Barbara Steele also resonated as Federico Fellini quickly utilized her in his film 8½ the same year. The beauty of Bava's images harks back to the feel of early German Expressionists such as Murnau and surrealists such as Cocteau, as well as the more contemporary images pioneered by Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer Sven Nykvist.

The second idea audiences extracted from Bava's film was the malicious violence and visual sadism seen throughout Black Sunday. Whereas Hammer Studios utilized full-blooded colour to heighten gore, Bava's stark black and white is equally more terrifying. Upon its release in the United States, several of the more violent sequenes in Black Sunday were omitted, such as the blood-splatted hammering of the Mask of Satan onto Steele's face, the gouging of a character's eye, a human face doused in flames and a kiss between a wart-strewn corpse and an entranced victim. Remarkably, Bava's effects still hold up extremely well, despite their low-tech nature: as seen in the resurrectio carnis of Steele's decayed body using eggs, rice and jello.

Also released under the title The Mask of Satan, Black Sunday is one of the greatest horror films ever produced: a fantastic debut brimming with suspense, intrigue and inventive cinematography. Featuring a star marking turn by Barbara Steele, Black Sunday is one of cinema's most atmospheric and enigmatic films. A key influence on directors as varied as Tim Burton, Martin Scorsese and David Lynch, Black Sunday is an aesthetically gorgeous blend of fluid and angular black and white cinematography that whose visual splendour is an obvious template to films such as Burton's Sleepy Hollow and Lynch's The Elephant Man.

* Black Sunday is available in Anchor Bay's Mario Bava Collection Vol 1

Other Mario Bava Films Reviewed:
The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1962) 6/10
Black Sabbath (1963) 7/10
Knives of the Avenger (1966) 2/10

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque