Once every 100 years the undead of hell terrorize the world in an orgy of stark horror... The Most Frightening Motion Picture You Have Ever Seen!
Black Sunday (Italian title: La maschera del demonio, also known as The Mask of Satan, aka Revenge of the Vampire aka Mask of the Demon aka The Demon's Mask) is a 1960 Italian horror film directed by Mario Bava, from a screenplay by Ennio de Concini and Mario Serandrei. The film stars legendary scream queen Barbara Steele, John Richardson, Arturo Dominici, and Ivo Garrani. It was Bava's directorial debut, although he had completed several previous feature films without credit. Black Sunday is a loose adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s short story “Viy”, about a vampiress-witch who is put to death by her own brother — only to return two hundred years hence to feed on her descendants.
By the social standards of the 1960s, Black Sunday was considered unusually gruesome, and was banned in the U.K. until 1968, because of its violence. In the U.S., some of the gore was censored, in-house, by the distributor, American International Pictures, before its theatrical release to the country’s cinemas. Even with being censored, the film still had moments of very graphic (for its time) scenes of horror and violence. With bloody scenes featuring a wooden stake being rammed into a vampire's eyeball (Bava's variation on the more traditional stake through the heart), a metal mask hammered into a beautiful woman's face, and other mayhem, the film was "far more graphic in its depiction of murder and death than audiences had previously seen."
Despite the censorship, Black Sunday was a world-wide critical and box office success — and launched the careers of director Mario Bava and movie star Barbara Steele. When released in the U.S. during 1961, the film was a commercial success for AIP, becoming the distributor's greatest financial success to that time. It also brought Barbara Steele to the attention of genre fans, and was the first of a series of horror movies she starred in over the next several years.
Decades after its original release, Black Sunday has continued to maintain a positive critical reputation. In The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (1986), Timothy Sullivan wrote, "A supremely atmospheric horror film, Black Sunday was Mario Bava's first and best directorial job, and the first of the 1960s cycle of Italian Gothic cinema ... [The film] remains [Bava's] greatest achievement, without a doubt one of the best horror films ever made."
Phil Hardy’s The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror observed, "Bava's first (and best) film as a solo director... The movie derives its lyrical force and indeed its sense of horror from the knowledge that a woman's sexuality cannot be eliminated and will return, bearing the scars of the violence with which it was repressed, to challenge the order of things."
Allmovie has noted, "Generally considered to be the foremost example of Italian Gothic horror, this darkly atmospheric black-and-white chiller put director Mario Bava on the international map...The atmosphere is so heavy and the imagery so dense that the film becomes nearly too rich in texture, but the sheer, ghastly beauty of it all is entrancing."
Glenn Erickson, in reviewing the Anchor Bay DVD release of the film, wrote, "Mario Bava's first credited feature is still the number one film of the Italian Horror renaissance, startlingly original and genuinely creepy...The budget may have been low, but Black Sunday is more atmospheric and cinematically active than any of Hollywood's classic horror films."
According to Tim Lucas, Black Sunday has had an "almost incalculable influence" on artists and filmmakers. The film's opening inquisition sequence was a strong inspiration for many similar scenes appearing in such movies as The Brainiac (1961), La cripta el l'incubo (U.S. Title: Terror in the Crypt) (1963), Bloody Pit of Horror (1965), and Michael Reeves's The She Beast (1966). Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film Bram Stoker's Dracula recreates several scenes from Black Sunday nearly exactly as they were filmed, in homage to Bava's film. Roman Coppola has cited Black Sunday as an influence on his father's film.
Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow (1999) "borrowed" some of the film's imagery, particularly in a scene in which Lisa Marie's face is punctured by an Iron Maiden. Burton has explicitly cited Bava's film as an inspiration, noting "One of the movies that remain with me probably stronger than anything is Black Sunday...there's a lot of old films - [Bava's] in particular - where the vibe and the feeling is what it's about... the feeling's a mixture of eroticism, of sex, of horror and starkness of image - and to me that is more real than what most people would consider realism in films..."
Black Sunday aka The Mask of Satan (1960) shown on "Creature Feature" presented by Count Gore De Vol:
You will never escape my vengeance, or of Satan's! My revenge will seek you out, and with the blood of your sons, and of their sons, and their sons, I will continue to live forever! They will restore me to life you now rob from me!
You, too, can feel the joy and happiness of hating.
