Black Sunday (1961)

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

People are voting emotionally.

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

"Black Sunday", also known as "The Mask of Satan", is considered to be Italian horror maestro Mario Bava's directorial debut, after he did uncredited work on a few prior movies. It is also the film that launched his career on the international stage.It is not surprising to discover that Bava had been a cinematographer for almost twenty years before he directed "Black Sunday". Simply put, the movie looks beautiful. The photography is exquisite, and the framing of each shot perfectly uses the film's quintessentially Gothic scenery.The movie is, basically, like looking at a book of Gothic photography come to life.This also has the correlative of making the movie's plot and characters distant and uninvolving.Beautiful photography is by its nature distancing. It makes you aware of the beauty of its subject, certainly, but also in so doing, makes you aware of its distance from you, thumbing through the book in your living room or book shop as you probably are.Cinema, with its marriage of the moving image with sound, can dissolve that barrier."Black Sunday", unfortunately, fails to do this. The story is something to do with an evil witch-vampire played by the brick-jawed Barbara Steel. She does have a very memorable introduction as we see her killed in one of horror's most memorable death sequences: a mask with nails on the inside is nailed onto her face, blood gushing from underneath it.Two hundred years later (in 1830 or thereabouts) some men stumble onto the tomb of the witch, and cutting his hand, one of the guys accidentally wakes her up. He also meets a descendant of the witch - also played by Barbara Steel in a double-role - and is struck by her beauty. Of course, the vampire-witch wants revenge on the descendants of those who had her executed, and commands her brother-in-arms to rise from his grave and start killing.I found it impossible to care about this movie beyond its beautiful looks. Part of the problem is Steel; with a double role, she doesn't make enough of an impression as either of the characters she plays. You will not be surprised to read that she did not get along with Bava on the set of this movie. Her performance seems reluctant, like the guy behind the camera wants her to show something she didn't sign on for.Another problem is that the movie is unnecessarily confusing toward the end. I admit I lost track of exactly what was going on.It seems as though Bava devoted all his energy to the filming of locations and objects, without bothering to get us close to the story or characters. Perhaps the defiant and brick-jawed Barbara Steel put him off?

This has long been considered to be Mario Bava's best film and it's easy to see why. As a film, this stands as a milestone in the horror genre, helping to inspire countless others (THE LONG HAIR OF DEATH for example) which flooded the industry in the following years. In fact, I enjoyed a lot of them also, some even more so than this film, but there's no denying the status that this holds as a classic of the genre. The Italian director was renowned for his startling photography and his films were always incredibly atmospheric.The film is light years ahead of contemporary foreign production in its use of camera-work and sets to create an unnerving Gothic atmosphere and an almost fairy-tale like fantasy involving witches and the dead coming back to life. In a way the film is also very old fashioned, almost reminiscent of the Universal gothics, such as FRANKENSTEIN, but with extra gore thrown in. As Bava filmed the picture in black and white he was able to challenge the boundaries of screen taste, and images where nails are hammered into eyeballs are extremely graphic for the time. Remember this was 1960, eleven years before Bava again pushed the boundaries of taste in his classic giallo film A BAY OF BLOOD.The acting is also very high class for a production of this kind. John Richardson (star of Hammer's SHE) is a fairly typical hero for the time, with jutting jaw and a sense of wholesomeness about him. Checchi is also very believable in his portrayal of the doctor who becomes a murderous slave, as are the actors playing the priest and the male apparition. However, stealing the limelight was a young British girl called Barbara Steele, acting for the first time in a horror film. Steele is unforgettable, her face will stay with you a long time after seeing this film and she copes admirably with a dual role (not an easy task, especially when one of the characters is utterly good and the other utterly evil). Steele was successful in her role and afterwards starred in a high number of Gothic masterpieces like this one, although sadly she has turned her back on the genre in recent years.What else do we have? An unsettling score and a hundred and one Gothic images composed on screen. In this nether world where the dead walk among the living, we have haunted castles with secret passages, spooky figures wreathed in mist, deserted graveyards with overgrown weeds, a couple of characters opening up a coffin and finding a horrible creature inside, bats, and even wolves howling in the background. And, of course, the powerful witch-burning opening which was also highly influential at the time. As you may be able to tell I loved this film a lot, as it holds everything that I could possibly want from a horror movie. It's like a Hammer movie but even better in that it's spookier and more powerful. If you like your films Gothic and atmospheric then this occasionally quaint but still chilling item just may be for you.

Mario Bava's directing debut, a movie so rich in atmosphere it feels like you're in the movie and not just watching a movie. The atmosphere of the movie got me in its grip in the beginning of the first 10 seconds or so into the movie. Not many movies have that effect on me. It was an atmosphere rich in feeling unwanted and guilt that I spent the first 5 minutes or so of the movie to get over that feeling. Indeed, the scene where the vampire witch gets her face nailed with the Mask of Satan was a scene that set the whole tone for the rest of the movie. Incredibly enough the movie did not break that atmosphere until the end. Only a few movies keeps the same atmosphere from start to finish, Lawrence of Arabia, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon comes to mind. I am not sure if it was the acting, the cinematography, the script or the direction but definitely the movie was well handled with a great sense of sensibility. Things happening in the movie did not seem to be the result of coincidence, everything seemed to be pieced greatly together by Mario Bava.Director: Mario Bava, written by: Ennio De Concini and Mario Serandrei, plot: survive, genre: horror, year of release: 1960, themes: heresy, life and death, summary: a vampire witch gets back from the dead when a young doctor accidentally spills blood in her mouth, then the witch stalks a young woman who resembles her in order to become fully alive. Like written earlier the movie has a strong feeling of being unwanted and guilt, the feeling of being wrong, the feeling of being unaccepted. This is where I get the feeling one of the movies's main themes are heresy and it was the Christians who nailed the Mask of Satan on the witch's face for practicing witchcraft. Witches have mostly been portrayed as those inhuman monsters who deserve to die in the name of God. That is how the Christians saw them and had them portrayed because they were full of bigotry. That bigotry led to a lot of women were burned as witches even for the most trivial reasons. But anyway, the movie captures that mood of heresy pretty damn good. So good it felt like I was in the movie.Barbara Steele in her portrayal of the witch was both creepy and wicked. She definitely had a very strong on-screen presence but she also had a strong off-screen presence, making most scenes unsettling to watch because it felt like the power of the witch was big enough to extend beyond the tomb she was lying in. What is scariest about her is that she wants what the main characters have and what she misses: life. Now the thought of an already dead person coming back from the dead in order to take your life is scary in and on itself. Made creepier by Barbara Steele's acting. Anyway, the movie like written earlier does not break the mood it established which is quite astonishing. The movie keeps its atmosphere without succumbing to jump scares, which I respect a lot. Because horror is a mood, an atmosphere, a feeling. Which many modern horror movies have forgotten all about. The reliance on that mood in this movie is staggering even though there isn't any gore or violence. This is a movie I will keep respecting until the day I die. Awesome movie.

A vengeful witch (Barbara Steele) and her fiendish servant return from the grave and begin a bloody campaign to possess the body of the witch's beautiful look-alike descendant (also Barbara Steele). Only the girl's brother and a handsome doctor stand in her way.For many years I kept putting off seeing this because I was not sure if i had seen it or not, getting it confused with "Black Sabbath" (which it really has nothing in common with). Now I have seen the Kino version that is on Netflix. From what I understand, there are two English versions and an Italian one. I am not sure which one of the English ones this is (though the dubbing is funny given that Steele does not speak Italian).Anyway, beautiful film with some good black and white photography. I definitely need to see it again in its various versions before really making any serious comments.