QUESTIONMARK PICTURES
I put the snort in "Ripsnorting good time"
Black Sunday / The Mask of Satan
INTRO:
I feel as though there is a certain prevailing stigma against older black and white horror movies. They usually come off as unintentionally campy or silly, which means “modern hardcore horror fans”, pronounced in the same way as “toe fungus”, are unable to take them seriously or get taken in by the film. Horror master Mario Bava’s directorial debut Black Sunday, alternately titled The Mask of Satan, remains a stand out example of this era of horror filmmaking and in many ways signaled its end.
THE PLOT:
The setup for Black Sunday is a fairly modest affair by today’s standards. A witch (Barbara Steele) and her brother (Arturo Dominic) are prosecuted for witchery and incest by having iron demon masks nailed to their faces. Before this happens the witch sets a curse on the descendants of her prosecutors, saying that she will return and seek revenge on their descendants. Two hundred years later she does just that when a pair of traveling doctors unwittingly open her tomb. Terror ensues.
VISUAL-STORYTELLING:
Most of Black Sunday’s strengths lie in its visuals. Every shot in the film does such a great job at translating mood and intent visually that I am somewhat convinced that an audience member could watch the entire film without dialogue and still understand what’s happening. The strong harsh shadows are what makes this movie still holds up to a degree. While the film probably won’t frighten many modern viewers, there are a couple sequences that gave me the heebie-jeebies putting this head and shoulders above other examples of the genre at the time and even today (I mean, we live in a time when Blumhouse is considered a quality horror production company). Also as a quick aside the effects for the film are kind of great, to the point where I needed to research how they were accomplished. A+.
ACTING:
Most of the acting is pretty mediocre for a majority of the film. It feels like the actors are really underacting which doesn’t work for a movie like this. Barbara Steele as the villain is great however, with her genuinely creepy and intense eyes that will probably haunt my dreams for a good while. The performances do pick up some energy as the conclusion draws closer and they are never tedious to watch but, most of the characters are fairly forgettable to a kind of drastic point. A named Boris dies about a third of the way through the film, and when it happened and the other characters were acting shocked I couldn’t for the life of me recall if I’d even see the guy before. It was only around ten minutes before the end that I realised who this dude was.
CONCLUSION:
Black Sunday is a good movie, this is something I cannot deny. The atmosphere and great rich cinematography are some of the best of the decade but it foibles the plot and character aspects of the story. The film is almost more interesting for what it's influenced rather than what the film actually is. Black Sunday was a massive hit when it was released by American International Pictures and almost single handedly kickstarted the Italian horror industry. Besides this, it was the aforementioned debut of Mario Bava who directed some of the greatest horror films of the late 60s and possibly of all time. Bava also created the Giallo film with The Girl Who Knew Too Much which would dominate exploitation theatres up until the early eighties, and spawn the slasher movie of which Bava would direct the first in Bay of Blood. Much of this film feels like a template for Bava’s later masterpiece The Whip and The Body which remains the king of gothic horror. Black Sunday played a pivotal role in horror growing up and expanding into darker, more violent realms and like many films that were the first, they are very rarely the best.
An awful looking color version was almost released (like Casablanca) a couple of years later and looked embarrassingly awful.
