BY TODD GARBARINI
I’m
a sucker for black and white horror films and thrillers. Hold That Ghost!
(1941) and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) are the closest
I ever got to an actual horror film when I was a child. The latter actually
frightened me and gave me more than a handful of nightmares while in kindergarten.
As I got older, I thrilled to the suspense-filled Psycho (1960) by
Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963), and George A.
Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) on network television viewings.
I picked up a VHS copy of John Llewelyn Moxey’s masterful The City of the
Dead under the insipid title of Horror Hotel and discovered a
classic that I love to this day. There is an overall spookiness that I
associate with black and white that I wish contemporary horror film directors
would go back to. It’s not all blood and guts – mood and atmosphere go a very long
way.
Following
my discovery of Dario Argento’s work after a theatrical screening of Creepers
in 1985, I began to read about Mario Bava’s work and how it influenced Signor
Argento’s style. Black Sunday, alternately known as The Mask of Satan
and Revenge of the Vampire, is a highly stylized gothic horror film that
is considered to be Mario Bava’s directorial debut despite him having come in
at the eleventh hour to finish up several films in the late 1950’s credited to
other directors: I Vampiri (1957), The Day the Sky Exploded (1958),
Caltiki – The Immortal Monster (1959) and The Giant of Marathon
(1959). Shot in 1960 and released on Thursday, March 9, 1961 in New York City, Black
Sunday is a creepy tale starring the luminous Barbara Steele in dual roles
as both a condemned witch in 17th Century Moldavia named Asa Vajda
and as a melancholic townswoman named Katja Vajda some 200 years later – quite
a coincidence! Asa condemns her persecutors to death for her fate which finds
her body placed into a mausoleum and found by chance two centuries later by a
doctor (Andrea Checci) and his assistant (John Richardson) who are enroot to a convention
and accidentally free Asa from her eternal sleep, giving her the opportunity to
enact evil upon the heads of those unlucky enough to be related to those
responsible for her death. While the plot is similar in theme to Mr. Moxey’s
classic The City of the Dead – I could hear the immortal words of the
villagers “Bring me Elizabeth Selwyn†in that film as I watched Black Sunday
– the time and place is much different and the film benefits enormously from
Signor Bava’s experience as a cinematographer even from the film’s opening
frames. The imagery that permeates much of Black Sunday are the stuff of
childhood nightmares: cobwebs, creepy cemeteries, eerie sounds in the
night…there is even a scene wherein a character fights off a vampire bat in a
fashion that obviously provided the inspiration for Jessica Harper’s Suzy Bannion
to do the same in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), albeit in dazzling
Technicolor.
Following
Black Sunday, Ms. Steele’s status as a “scream queen†was cemented and she
went on to appear in Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1961),
Riccardo Freda’s The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock (1962) and The Ghost
(1963), Antonio Margheriti’s Castle of Blood (1964), Massimo Pupillo’s Terror-Creatures
From the Grave (1965), and Mario Caiano’s Nightmare Castle (1965). She
also managed to appear in Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963) during this time.
Kino
Lorber has built a reputation for releasing beloved movies in fine fashion on
DVD and Blu-ray. It has come to my attention that for the past year Kino Lorber
has also had a streaming service available and this is indeed good news for
genre fans who love to watch movies on different devices. There is a wealth of
horror titles available on streaming for those who want to watch something right
now and these films are a welcome respite from the usual October/Halloween
horror fare that has become de rigueur this time of the year. Don’t get me
wrong, I love Burnt Offerings (1976), Halloween (1978), Alien
(1979), The Shining (1980), and The Descent (2006) just as much
as the next genre fan, but it’s nice to go back and see something I either
haven’t seen before or something that I haven’t seen in over 30 years. NOTE: The
title card in Black Sunday is under the alternate title of The Mask
of Satan.
Click
here to create an account to either buy or
rent Black Sunday on streaming on KinoNow.com.
Click here to buy the Blu-ray edition from Amazon.