Trailer to
The Mask of Satan:
Black Sunday (a.k.a. The Mask of Satan — the version we watched this time around) is often lauded as the directorial debut of the Italian auteur, Mario Bava, but that is true in onscreen credit only. Even if one ignores his early (and probably lost) documentary shorts from the '40s, Bava's years of experience as cinematographer had already led to un-credited directorial work as well as credited second-unit work on some noteworthy feature films, including Riccardo Freda's historically important* I Vampiri / Lust of the Vampire (1957 / trailer), the historically important* Day the Sky Exploded / La morte viene dallo sapzio (1958 / trailer / full film), the not so dumb and grossly fun Caltiki il mostro immortale / Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (1959 / Trailer from Hell), and the Steve Reeve movies The White Warrior / Agi Murad il diavolo bianco [1959 / trailer], Hercules Unchained / Ercole e la regina di Lidia [1959 / trailer]), and The Giant of Marathon / La battaglia di Maratona (1959 / trailer). It was for his work on the last and Caltiki, the Immortal Monster that the production company of both movies, Galatea, offered Bava the chance of a project of his own; inspired by the success of Hammer Film's Dracula (1958 / trailer), Bava decided to make a gothic horror film and turned to Gogol's classic novella Viy for inspiration. (Needless to say, the final film bears but the barest of resemblances to Gogol's tale.)
* Aside from being an entertaining horror movie, Lust of the Vampire is historically important in that it is both Italy's first vampire movie and sound horror movie, if not Italy's first horror movie. (The silent classic L'Inferno [1911 / full film], Italy's first full-length movie, is often called the country's first horror movie, but we would argue that while the movie has horrific images, as any movie based on Dante's Divine Comedy should, neither Dante's poem nor the movie are truly, simply "horror".) As for The Day the Sky Exploded, aside from being an entertaining science fiction movie, it is historically important as Italy's first sound science fiction film. (The silent film The Mechanical Man / L'uomo meccanico [1921 / what survives] is Italy's earliest known feature-length science-fiction film; once thought lost, 26 minutes are now known to have survived. Starring, directed and written by the early and mostly forgotten French comedian André Deed [22 Feb 1879 – 4 Oct 1940], the surviving material evidences that the intention was not science fiction but comedy.) Rumors abound that the credited director of The Day the Sky Exploded, Paulo Heusch (26 Feb 1924 – 21 Oct 1982), the later director of Werewolf in a Girl's Dormitory (1961), let Bava call the shots on The Day the Sky Exploded.
The narrative of Black Sunday is oddly familiar, but the way it is told is mesmerizing — and that despite some incredibly wooden acting,* almost inanely florid dialogue,** and truly atrocious dubbing. The opening scene itself grabs the viewer by the cajones, and while the pressure varies throughout the rest of the movie, Black Sunday never lets go. The camera glides through a dark and stormy night and, in a wonderfully shot and moody scene that melds beautiful and horrific imagery, we witness how, in Moldavia of yesteryear, the aristocratic vampire witch Asa Vajda (Steele) and her evil lover Igor Javutich (Arturo Dominici [2 Jan 1916 – 7 Sept 1992] of Castle of Blood [1964]) are condemned to death by a maddened crowd led by her noble-blooded brother (Ivo Garrani [6 Feb 1924 – 25 Mar 2015] of The Chosen / Holocaust 2000 [1977 / trailer], Deadly Inheritance / Omicidio per vocazione [1968 / Italian trailer] and Atom Age Vampire / Seddok, l'erede di Satana [1960 / trailer]), ably assisted by masked muscular inquisitionists with cleanly shaven chests on loan from Gold's Gym. (The first true shock of the movie is when they hammer the Mask of Satan onto Asa's face, a scene in which the blood still packs a punch in B&W.) Oddly enough, though all know the two beings to be evil incarnate that can only be truly destroyed by fire, the sudden thunderstorm leads to Javutch being buried in unconsecrated ground and Asa being entombed in the family crypt, so one knows that Asa's evil is hardly eternally thwarted...
* Perhaps one can put the blame on the dubbing, but while Barbara Steele exudes captivating malevolence as the movie's Bad Gal Asa Vajda, she is oddly milquetoast and stiff as Good Gal Katia Vajda. Nevertheless, the movie rightly made her a star in Italy and, of course, laid the bedrock of her later reputation as a horror icon.
** For example, in the lengthy relationship-building scene between Good Gal Katia and the main hero, cut from the American version, in which Katia bemoans like a proto-emo.
Two centuries later, sometime in the 1800s, Asa's freedom comes in the form of two traveling idiots, Dr. Choma Kruvajan (Andrea Checchi [21 Oct 1916 – 29 Mar 1974]) of Fritz Lang's 1000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse / Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse [1960 / trailer] and the not very horrific horror peplum War of the Zombies / Roma contro Roma [1964 / trailer]) and his assistant, Dr. Andrej Gorobec (John Richardson [19 Jan 1934 – 5 Jan 1921]).* As doctors are wont to do, Dr. Kruvajan destroys the cross keeping Asa in her sepulcher, removes the Mask of Satan, and revives her by accidentally dripping his blood upon her; Dr. Gorobec, in turns, meets and is thoroughly smitten by the beautiful Katia Vajda (Barbra Steele), Asa's descendant and spitting image...
* Like Barbara Steele, John Richardson was a former contract player of the Rank Organisation; the two had already appeared in minor parts in a few films together — in Sapphire (1959), for example, they share a scene as two art students filling in some background to the film's detective (see: Barbara Steele Part I). From 1967 to 1973, he was married to Babe of Yesteryear Martine Beswick (of Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde [1971], Seizure [1974, with Jonathan Frid], The Happy Hooker Goes to Hollywood [1980, with Dick Miller], Evil Spirits [1981, with Yvette Vickers], From a Whisper to a Scream [1987, with Susan Tyrrell]), and can himself be found in a number of fun movies, including She (1965 / trailer), The Vengeance of She (1968 / trailer), One Million Years B.C. (1966 / trailer), in which he looked hot but not as a hot as Raquel Welch, Execution (1968 / full film), Torso (1973 / trailer), Umberto Lenzi's Eyeball (1975 / trailer), Reflections in Black (1975 / full film), Nine Guests for a Crime (1977 / full film), Murder Obsession (1981 / trailer), Frankenstein '80 (1972 / trailer), The Church (1989 / trailer), and more.
In no short time Javutich has risen from the grave and the bodies start falling — some turning into vampires, others simply being killed — as Asa connives to destroy the lineage of the Vajda family and steal Katia's youth, vitality, and very life. Can Dr. Gorobec stop the spreading evil and save the woman he loves? (What do you think?)
The story is more than flawed and often the developments are a bit of a headscratcher — Why doesn't Javutich vampirize everyone he kills? A family seriously keeps portraits of the two evilest descendants hanging prominently in their main room? Who opens the hatch to what might be called the "Pit of Death"? — and there is more than one truly laughable dues ex machina* to the narrative, including unknown secret passages and how Katia's assumed dead brother Constantine (Enrico Olivieri [14 Dec 1939 – 29 Jan 2022] of Fuga in Francia [1948 / film in Italian] and Sigfrido [1958 / trailer]) suddenly shows up and lives long enough to help save Dr. Gorobec during his big fight against an oddly non-biting Javutich.
* In regards to the dues ex machina, actually, they have always been a key aspect of gothic horror — can any dues ex machina surpass the giant helmet that kills Conrad in the progenitor of gothic fiction from 1794, Horace Walpole's novel The Castle of Otranto? — so one should really give even the most illogical one in Black Sunday a bit of slack...
It is one of the amazing aspects of the movie that despite its apparent flaws, it remains an mesmerizing and entertaining cinematic experience, if not a suspenseful and often scary one, too. The Mask of Satan drips atmosphere, is full of seductive camerawork that even when baroque is never superfluous, and overflows with arresting visuals that are truly a pleasure to watch. (More than one of which a cinephile can recognize as an homage to earlier horror classics, the most obvious one being a horse-carriage nod to Nosferatu [1922 / full film].)
At the same time, the movie is liberally laced with shocks that work — to name but a few: a sudden reveal of a skeletal ribcage, eyes bubbling their way upwards back into their sockets, a corpse opening its eyes, the previously mentioned scene of the mask being hammered onto Asa's face, a later scene in which the local priest (Antonio Pierfederici [18 Mar 1919 – 6 Jan 1999] of the proto-zombie horror Terror-Creatures from the Grave / 5 tombe per un medium [1965 / trailer, with Barbara Steele]), The Kiss of Death / Il bacio [1974 / soundtrack], and I'll See You in Hell / Ti aspetterò all'inferno [1960 / full film]) stakes a vampire in a grave through the eye, Javutch's muddy hands as he claws his way out of his grave, and the discovery of the body of the stableman Boris (Renato Terra [26 July 1922 – 28 Nov 2010)]of Goliath and the Vampires / Maciste contro il vampiro [1961 / trailer], Castle of the Living Dead / Il castello dei morti vivi [1964 / trailer] and Requiescant [1967]). One the best vignettes is the prolonged one involving the innkeeper's daughter, Sonya (Germana Dominici [1 Dec 1946 – 3 Jan 2024] of The Seventh Grave / La settima tomba [1965 / trailer]): tense and suspenseful, her doom most expected, the scene teases effectively but ends most unexpectedly.
Although poorly received upon its release, Black Sunday* is one of those films — like George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) or James Whale's Frankenstein (1931 / trailer) or Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974 / trailer) or Rupert Julian's Phantom of the Opera (1925 / full film) or Georges Franju's Eyes without a Face (1960 / French trailer) or, or, or — that every true horror fan really should watch at least once in their life. A masterpiece of style, it is both beautiful and horrific, with scenes that — as in Eyes without a Face, a similarly beautiful and horrific artistic masterpiece — would have been completely unpalatable for audiences of the day had they been in color, and that are still shocking enough today in B&W. If you haven't seen it yet, do so now. The Mask of Satan is easily found online, like here at the Internet Archives.
* The original Italian title is La maschera del demonio, or The Mask of Satan. When AIP picked it up for release in the US, they trimmed some of the violence and sex, redubbed everyone, replaced the original score with one by Les Baxter (14 Mar 1922 – 15 Jan 1996), and released it as part of an incongruous double feature with Roger Corman's The Little Shop of Horrors (1960 / trailer). It proved to be one of AIP's first and largest hit releases. We've seen both The Mask of Satan and Black Sunday and would say that watching either version if better than never watching any version.
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