It kickstarted the career of future scream queen Barbara Steele (The Pit And The Pendulum<\/em>, Piranha<\/em>) and Hammer regular John Richardson (She<\/em>, One Million Years BC<\/em>), and cemented its director, Mario Bava, as the founding father of Italian horror cinema \u2013 \u201cthe Italian Hitchcock\u201d \u2013 whose influence on everything from sleazy giallo pictures to gloomy gothic horror to the modern slasher movie would become utterly indisputable.<\/p>\n Released in Italy in 1960 under the name La Maschera Del Demonio<\/em> (The Mask Of Satan<\/em>), technically Bava’s fifth film as director, but given the circumstances behind his prior movies \u2013 often called in to replace an original director bruised in a spat with the studio \u2013 Black Sunday<\/em> is perhaps best thought of as Mario Bava’s debut, certainly the first project he chose, and the first project he saw through from beginning to end. Fittingly for a man whose reputation would become so lionised both in his homeland and by horror archivists worldwide, Black Sunday<\/em> is from all angles possible the perfect gothic horror movie.<\/p>\n Filmed partly on location in a crumbling Italian castle, and in expansive, evocative studio sets that made similarly toned Hammer or Amicus flicks from the same period look like a Halloween-themed broadcasts from Andi Peters’ broom cupboard, from its opening sequence \u2013 a prologue in which Steele’s eyerolling sorceress Asa Vajda and her loyal agent Javuto (Arturo Dominici) are sentenced to death by a hooded figure for witchcraft\u00a0\u2013\u00a0we’re not only shown an incredible evocative world, instantly thrown into the cancerous black heart of the story, but then also literally placed within it as the camera follows a spiked devil mask through its iron eye slots as it is taken on a funeral march toward Vajda’s screaming, contorted face, the barbs piercing her flesh in a scene so shocking it was excised from many international cuts.<\/p>\n It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine the 33-year-old Lucio Fulci shifting in his cinema stall, his trousers tightening and his face hot with the thought of the voyeuristic, eyeball-rupturing possibilities his future might hold. We feel for anyone sat nearby when one vampire gets a stake through the eyeball, and pray and time was indeed the ultimate healer.<\/p>\n
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