Black Sunday (1960)

Official trailer

Black Sunday deserves its 8 as a film where atmosphere is so thick you could cut it, the debut of Mario Bava as a director and among the most visually ravishing horror films ever made in black and white. Bava had been a cinematographer, and it shows in every frame. The film is a feast of fog, candlelight, crumbling crypts, and gliding camerawork, a gothic nightmare so beautifully shot that its thin story barely matters.

It also made a star of Barbara Steele, whose face became the defining image of European horror, and it launched the Italian gothic tradition that would run for decades.

Few films have me staring at the screen the way Black Sunday does, and afterward I can barely tell you what happened in it. Nearly every shot is gorgeous enough to print, and nearly every line of dialogue gets a shrug from me. The look wins by enough to land an 8, and the story is what keeps it from climbing higher.

The plot is standard gothic revenge, but nobody watches Black Sunday for plot. They watch it for the way Bava turns light and shadow into pure dread, and on that level it’s a masterpiece. Few films have ever looked this good while meaning this little, and the look is more than enough.

Bava the Visual Magician

Mario Bava shot Black Sunday himself, and his command of black-and-white imagery is total. The film opens with one of horror’s great sequences, a witch being executed by having a spiked mask hammered onto her face, and from there it never lets up visually. Bava fills the frame with drifting fog, shafts of moonlight, decaying castle interiors, and a constantly moving camera that prowls through the gothic spaces like a predator. The film is a sustained demonstration of how to build terror from light alone.

That spiked-mask opening is the scene I’d use to explain Bava to anyone. It’s cruel and beautiful at once, and it tells you right away that this director is going to make you look at things you’d rather not.

What makes Bava special is that he achieved all of it on a tiny budget through ingenuity instead of money. The fog hides cheap sets. Clever lighting turns a small space into an endless crypt. A slow camera move transforms a static room into a place of dread. Bava was a magician of the practical, conjuring atmosphere from almost nothing, and the film is a tutorial in how visual craft can wholly outrun resources. Every limitation became an opportunity for an effect.

Barbara Steele’s Double Face

Barbara Steele plays a dual role, the executed witch Asa and her innocent descendant Katia, and the casting made her an icon. Steele has one of the great faces in horror, large dark eyes and strong features that can shift from angelic to demonic with a change of expression, and Bava uses it as the film’s central image. As the resurrected witch she’s pure malevolent seduction. As the innocent she’s fragile and luminous. The same face serves both, the film’s cleverest idea.

Steele became the queen of European horror on the strength of this performance, and watching the film it’s easy to see why. Bava frames her in close-up again and again, letting her face convey the film’s dread and desire. She’s less an actress giving a performance here than an image being deployed, a face that embodies the gothic itself. The film understands that she’s its greatest special effect and uses her accordingly.

Steele is the reason I’d come back to this film. Those eyes do more work than the whole screenplay, and my eyes stay locked on her whenever she’s in the frame.

The Story That Barely Matters

The plot is gothic boilerplate. A witch executed centuries ago is accidentally revived and seeks to possess the body of her innocent descendant, while a young doctor tries to save the girl. It’s a thin clothesline on which Bava hangs his set pieces, and the film makes no real effort to develop its characters or surprise its audience. The story exists to move the camera from one gorgeous gothic tableau to the next.

This is the film’s only real weakness, and it’s where I lose some interest in Black Sunday. As narrative it’s forgettable, its characters flat and its plot mechanical, and I stop caring about the young doctor almost as soon as he appears. As pure cinema, as a sustained exercise in atmosphere and image, it’s stunning. Bava clearly cared about the look far more than the story, and anyone who needs a gripping plot will be bored. Anyone who can be hypnotized by images will be enthralled.

Does Black Sunday still hold up?

Black Sunday launched both Mario Bava’s career and the Italian gothic tradition, and it looks ravishing. Bava’s command of black-and-white atmosphere, conjured from a tiny budget through fog, light and a prowling camera, is masterful, and Barbara Steele’s dual performance gave European horror its defining face. It loses points for a thin, mechanical plot and flat characters that exist only to move the camera between set pieces.

I give it an 8 because the look alone gets it almost all the way. Bava’s fog and candlelight are as good as black-and-white horror gets, and Steele’s face does the rest, but a film this beautiful deserved a story I cared about, and it never gives me one. Anyone who values horror as a visual art should see it.

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