Day Fifteen: Black Sunday (1960)
Black Sunday is the first film by the famed Italian horror director Mario Bava. The film is visually delicious, with a crisp, ripe atmosphere (think the Universal horror movies of 1930s and 1940s as shot by John Toll) that’s as impressive as any I’ve seen, but the story is just too poor, too non-existent.
The opening is impressive and promises a rich, flamboyant bit of gothic. We begin with a witch, or a vampire (the terms are used interchangably here) having an iron maiden hammered into her face, blood spurts and just before she’s to be burned, she swears her revenge. But she won’t burn, Satan seems to be protecting her, and so she’s thrown in a crypt that’s protected by a cross that can be seen by her corpse via a window in the coffin (a nifty image). The witch is Princess Asa (Barbara Steele, also in Shivers), and needless to say, she gets her reprisal when a couple of academics come screwing around the crypt two hundred years later.
Steele has presence, she’s sexual in that death kissed way that films like this require, but she’s given little to do. Over an hour of the film is the, slow, slow, slow set up of the rise of Asa. Bava spends an inordinate amount of time photographing doors closing, or opening, ominiously. I love a rich, dread inducing slow build, but its all in the service of very little. The Universal sequels of yesteryear were silly, but they at least had snap and a sense of fun. Bava takes himself dangerously seriously here, and that can be a killer for a film as purplish as this one.
Black Sunday does, as I say, have incredible black and white cinematography, it should maybe be seen once for this alone, but the story itself is bare bones and uninvolving. If you aren’t into this sort of thing, the ripe Italian horror of the 1960s, you may find the eightyish minutes to be a bit of a chore.
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