Short Take: Black Sunday

Gothic horror made quite a comeback in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The movies produced by England's Hammer Studios were the most popular of the trend, but the Italian film Black Sunday, directed by Mario Bava, was perhaps the best. It begins in 17th-century Moldavia, when a witch (Barbara Steele) and her lover (Arturo Dominici) are ritually disfigured and burned at the stake on the orders of her royal brother (Ivo Garrani). She puts a curse on their family, and two centuries later, after a pair of traveling doctors (John Richardson and Andrea Checchi) disturb her tomb, her spirit puts it in motion. Her ultimate goal is to take possession of the young princess (also played by Steele) who resembles her. Visually, the film is a lavish pastiche of Gothic tropes: tangled forests of gnarled, barren trees; castles and crypts in various stages of decrepitude; ground fog everywhere. These, combined with the magnificent chiaroscuro of Bava's black-and-white cinematography, give every scene an eerie, spellbinding quality. Bava sets the stage wonderfully, and he keeps the pulpy horror melodrama briskly paced and suspenseful. True to the genre's form, he also delivers some indelible moments of both grisliness and the uncanny. The saucer-eyed Barbara Steele has a great camera face, and her bold features give the witch's malevolence a fitting hyperbole. Giorgio Giovannini provided the spectacular production design. The screenplay, by Ennio De Concini and Mario Serandrei (with uncredited contributions from Bava, Marcello Coscia, and Dino De Palma), was inspired by the short story "Viy," by Nikolai Gogol. The version of the film available in North America is dubbed into English, using a script translation by George Higgins III. The movie's original Italian title is La maschera del demonio (The Mask of the Demon).