(LA MASCHERA DEL DEMONIO, Mario Bava, Italy 1960, 83 min., 16mm)
(DANZA MACABRA, Antonio Margheriti, Italy 1964, 87 min.)
British actress and cult icon Barbara Steele stars in a pair of stylish Italian horror classics from the early ’60s. In Black Sunday, she’s vampire/witch Princess Katia, who, tired of hanging around her crypt, joins a ghoulish sidekick to visit a Russian castle where they gorge themselves on human blood—until the arrival of the priest and the bonfire. Cult director Bava’s visual excess and swooping camera movements make this thriller a must-see. Then, in Castle of Blood, a writer bets that he can spend a night in a castle occupied by restless and vengeful spirits. Steele plays a nicer member of the living dead who tries to aid the writer’s escape. Two films for one admission price.
Program Notes
“I am just a craftsman. I make movies the same way I’d make chairs.” This famous understatement issued by Mario Bava during one of the rare TV interviews he gave, although certainly exaggerated by his habit to show off self-underestimation, gives a perfect sense of the so-called Italian “genre” cinema of the 60s and 70s. The example of Mario Bava is emblematic: he directed his first film, Black Sunday, relatively late in his career, when he was 45 years old, after having spent most of his professional life as a highly appreciated director of photography for Italian and foreign productions. Similarly, Antonio Margheriti began as a cinematographer and camera-man, and neither he nor Bava ever abandoned their original craft while making their films as directors.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the main feature of Italian gothic cinema, of which both Black Sunday and Castle of Blood are excellent examples, is the pictorial strength of images, usually shot in an elegant black and white that transports the viewer into a fantastic, disturbing world. This is particularly true with Black Sunday and Castle of Blood, two scary tales whose effectiveness is derived more from the gloomy mood than from the solidity of the narrative structure or smartness of the dialogue (which sometimes sounds ridiculous, notably in the dubbed English version). Consequently, it is very easy to understand the reason why these films have had box-office success, both in Italy and abroad, while the reaction of journalists has not been as generous – Variety defined Black Sunday’s screenplay as “a grade school imitation of Poe.”
However, it is also true that the fantastic nature of most situations in these films was instrumental in creating that mesmerizing mood just mentioned. The trademarks of these gothic horror movies are an almost obsessive use of zoom, deep focus, long shots, anti-classical editing and amazing optical effects, all of which add to the overall expressionistic effect. Black Sunday provides a perfect example of this in the scene in which the witch gets older in front of the camera, with no editing cuts, using only lights and make-up to create the special effects.
Unlike the Italian comedy of the 50s and 60s, Italian gothic films are expressions of a cinema which relies more on the power of vision than on the power of words, and this may be one of the reasons why they have been so rapidly forgotten in their own country of origin, despite attempts to capture an intellectual audience by claiming high-brow influences – Black Sunday is presented as an adaptation of Gogol’s short story The Vij; one of the characters in Castle of Blood is the writer Edgar Allan Poe. Even though they use a different film language, both horror films and comedies are expressions of the post-war sensitivity of a nation which found itself trapped in an attempt to wake from the nightmare of defeat. The 50s and the 60s are crucial years in this sense, and Italian horror and comedy are both ways to exorcise fear, in the former case by laughing at it, in the latter by moving it to gothic, exotic places.
Although it was made mainly for commercial purposes, Italian gothic cinema is more than simple entertainment. Thanks to horror fans such as Quentin Tarantino, Brian De Palma, Tim Burton and Joe Dante, who have tried to preserve the memory of these films by showing them whenever possible and quoting them in their own movies, this cinema is experiencing an important revival period. Now, younger audiences can enjoy again the Mario Bava’s elegant cinematography in Black Sunday and the beauty of Barbara Steele, the Queen of Italian horror, in both Black Sunday and Castle of Blood.
Sabrina Negri, Student, L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation.
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