Black Sunday

The opening is unforgettable: an iron mask nailed to a witch’s face, its spikes piercing skin as blood seeps through. For a moment you think you’re in for the full nightmare Mario Bava’s reputation suggests. But Black Sunday never quite sustains that ferocity. Instead it drifts into gothic fog and crumbling castles, with wandering doctors who seem more lost than the audience. The film looks gorgeous—shadows curling across Barbara Steele’s wide, haunted eyes—but beauty doesn’t always translate into drive.

It is sometimes mislabelled the first giallo, but the claim doesn’t stand. Can a black-and-white gothic, steeped in atmosphere rather than spectacle, really count? If anything it’s proto-giallo, though even that feels like a stretch. In truth this is gothic horror in the classic mould: execution masks, haunted ruins, candlelit corridors. And yet, within those trappings, you catch glimmers of what Bava would later unleash in vivid colour—lurid style, violence staged like theatre, horror as art direction.

For all its striking images, I found myself drifting with it rather than pulled along. The mask may scar the memory, but the rest of the film settles into faint impressions—a striking prologue to a career, rather than the full statement.