Building to October - Mario Bava (Black Sunday)

 For My Top Five Favorite Bava Moments from Black Sunday 1960 see October 2014 Bava Five

I was working late and thought why not have a nice little Bava run of films from an old Anchor Bay set. Obviously I would start with Bava's revered Gothic classic from 1960. Vampires returning from two centuries of sleep to drink the blood of the living and render the House of Vajda extinct is basically the plot in a nutshell. If this was about the plot itself, Black Sunday wouldn't necessarily stand out. It is what Bava, the artist who could paint a portrait in B&W or color, that gives his Gothic chiller its legendary status. Why I love the 60s as a decade is that we have such a wide variety of subgenres to choose from. Sure, I think the horror genre turns a corner with Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) and definitely for good alters the course into a darkness Barbara Steele's witch in "Black Sunday" couldn't even compete with in Hooper's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" in the early 70s.

But in the 60s, one of my favorite decades, "Black Sunday" gave Director Mario Bava his entrance into the Hall of Greats, with such commemorators, Corman and Fisher. And much like the slashers that followed "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th", the Italian film industry sure seemed to flourish once Bava gave the world, "Black Sunday". I am the first to say, though, that the story itself or especially the dialogue, really heighten the legacy of "Black Sunday" as much as Bava's own version/vision of the Universal Horrors of the past and Barbara Steele's emergence as an icon of horror. 

The disregarded cemetery, family castle with its (naturally) secret passages, countryside and period villages, spiked-mask execution with masked executioners and torches lit, vampirism, crumbling mausoleum with an invading bat, resurrection of hole-faced Katia thanks to visiting professor's cut hand bleeding, Katia's "siphoning youth" from descendant Asa, and Katia's Satanist lover, Igor, causing mayhem to the Vajda family in revenge for their deaths two centuries prior are brought to life with a presentation where Bava transplants you elsewhere. Time and place, foretold by Bava, distinctly away from the modern into the far away, removing us from what we experience in the day to day for something altogether different. Universal did that with their many Gothic horrors and Bava (along with Hammer and Corman with AIP) in Italy applied his own personality and stylistic footprint. But Bava, to his credit, didn't get typecast specifically with "Black Sunday". He was able to craft horrors from different times and places, always telling a story with an approach definitively his own. Steele would also capitalize on the success of this film, cast in other Gothic Italian productions (and even in a Corman film) among others, so beautiful...and often also quite deadly. Steele, charismatic as any of her male horror counterparts, gets to play two different parts, Vajda women of different centuries, one quite venomous, the other an innocent unexpectedly entrapped in a plot of revenge she was unprepared for. Bava's camera, where she looks either vicious or frightened, loves Steele. 

But the film has its critics. You read all the time that the film looks great but has no real substance. That the plot is a retread of vampire cliches with some religious undertones rescued by a serious master of atmosphere and sinister setpieces, shot effectively and composed with an eye for detail despite a lack of a real budget. I say, on the other hand, that Bava's ability to accomplish what he does in spite of the cliches and story familiarity is a triumph. He takes the Universal Gothic horrors, dusts them off, freshened the material with his own genius by captivating us with attention to filling the entire screen with this bleak, ominous, tense presence of accursed land and populace. As if what happened two centuries past still somehow strangleholds anyone living in the present of the film's setting. I think that is impressive. Travelers just passing through become as imperiled as those who have remained in place through the centuries.