Bava’s Black Sunday

The following is an edited excerpt from my essay ‘Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960)’

When Mario Bava directed Black Sunday, he already had an impressive filmography under his belt. Between 1937 and 1959, he had worked on over 60 movies as a camera assistant and on additional photography and special effects. In 1959 he took over from Ricardo Freda as director on the film Caltiki - The Immortal Monster, and the following year he was given his full feature directorial debut.

Bava was given the opportunity to make a film for foreign markets, and chose to lean into the gothic with a loose adaptation of ‘Viy’ - Nikolai Gogol’s novella about a vengeful witch and her supernatural horrors. Considering 1960 was the year of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, and Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, horror films that all focus more on the more grounded evil of what humans do to one another, this was a bold move. However, Bava wanted to make a movie that would appeal to the recent success of Terence Philips’ Dracula for Hammer.

His gamble paid off. By making a gothic vampire/witch film in 1960 amidst a burgeoning movement in genre cinema that was exploring more human horrors, Bava created what has been referred to as the "crowning achievement of Italian gothic horror". Black Sunday turned Barbara Steele into a star, and is now considered a pioneering work that set the standards for Italian horror films, including giallo, with its juxtaposition of beautiful and horrific elements, eroticism and graphic violence.

Radically different from his later films like Black Sabbath, Blood and Black Lace, A Bay of Blood and Lisa and the Devil, it was Black Sunday that made Mario Bava the Grandfather of Italian Horror.

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