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.