Italian horror maestro Mario Bava’s directorial debut, BLACK SUNDAY - also known as THE MASK OF SATAN, a more literal translation from its original Italian titleremains a gothic mood-enhancer par excellence, much obliged to Bava’s own cinematographic experiences and aptitude, its spooky, gnarly, chiaroscuro-heavy, imposingly ornate scenography substantively trumps up the well-worn story template drawn from Nikolai Gogol’s short story “Viy”.
Set in the 19th century Moldavia, the corpse of Asa Vajda (Steele), executed (with a mask full of sharp spikes hammered into her face) for witchery alongside her lover Javutich (a menacingly vampiric Dominici) two centuries earlier, is resurrected inadvertently by the blood of passer-by Dr. Kruvajan (a four-square Checchi transiting two worlds apart as the unfortunate enabler-cum-victim) in a sepulchral crypt and immediately she tries to actualize the centuries-old curse hexed upon her demise, to exact revenge on the descendants of her brother who put her on the stake in the first place: Prince Vajda (Garrani) and his two children, son Constantine (Olivieri) and daughter Katia (Steele again, comporting herself with assured commitment in this dichotomous star-turn), a dead ringer of Asa herself, whose corporeal body she intends to possess.
The plot courses through Isa’s inevitable resurrection and its equally inevitable debacle - effected by a concerted effort from a young doctor Gorobec (Richardson), who takes a shine to Katia and the God-fearing multitude - with steady assurance (without leaning heavily on gore or cheap scare) by nailing its Christianity-vanquishing-Satanism colors to the mast, and boosting an emphatically compelling score by Roberto Nicolosi, BLACK SUNDAY takes the mantle from earlier Hollywood horror and revitalizes the genre with a spellbound aura of chthonic terror, well-honed inevitability and the legerdemain of special effects (Katia’s rapid-aging process is quite a blinder of the magic-making practice), heralding the heyday of Italian “giallo” in the years to come, in which Bava himself would become quite a pioneer along with his younger compatriots Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Umberto Lenzi, just to name a few.
referential entries: Carl Theodor Dreyer’s VAMPYR (1932, 7.7/10); René Clair’s I MARRIED A WITCH (1942, 5.8/10).