The Mask of Satan // Black Sunday (1960)
“Once every 100 years… the undead demons of hell terrorize the world in an orgy of stark horror!’
This is exactly the kind of film that I love. The Mask of Satan — or Black Sunday as it was released in America — is a film completely of its time: part of the windtorn black and white genre that can only be enjoyed in a dark room on a cold night, where the films seems to ooze atmosphere to the point that it becomes part of the room’s. It has one of the most heavy metal openings to a film I have ever seen: hooded inquisitors hammer a nailed mask into the face of a condemned witch. The wind howls, the music crescendos, and the film begins: “THE MASK OF SATAN”
This shocking opening sets the mood, and the rest of the film follows suit. Despite the gothic trappings, the film has a mid-twentieth century campiness that is displayed in vicious vampire bats that look about as real and scary as a fur toque dangling from a string. The characters often speak in dramatic hyperbole, its silliness only increased by the questionable English dub. At any moment the characters could be reading straight off the DVD blurb:
“STARE INTO THESE EYES… DISCOVER DEEP WITHIN THEM THE UNSPEAKABLE TERRIFYING SECRET OF BLACK SUNDAY… IT WILL PARALYZE YOU WITH FRIGHT!”
And I loved every moment of it.
But the best moments in the film are the moments devoid of dialogue, either carried by the film’s dramatic score, the never-ending howl of the elements, or just pure, uncomfortable silence. This is not a film reliant on its script, but rather on its style. It is a film that uses every trick it knows in order to try and tell the most chilling tale ever told: the howling of the wind blowing through a gothic castle, the uncertain descent into a dank crypt, the discover of a secret passageway, and the grandstand reanimation of a decayed corpse. There’s even an angry mob – flaming torches and pitchforks included. This film is certainly more black than white. Shadows, cobwebs and cemetarian landscapes are its grammar. Bava’s cinematic world is dark and moody.
I realise at this point I still haven’t discussed the plot of the film, but it doesn’t really matter. Regardless, it concerns the resurrection of a vengeful witch and her fiendish lover, and their murderous campaign to possess the body of the witch’s doppelgänger descendent. Legendary horror actress Barbara Steele plays both the witch, Princess Asa, and her descendant, Katia. But the plot isn’t so important to the film’s intention. The Mask of Satan is designed to be an easily disposable hour-and-a-half of horror that would shock its contemporary audiences, ultimately resulting in controversy. Because of this, it has become somewhat of a cult film over the years.
Subscribers to the cult include director and the once and former king of the camp gothic genre, Tim Burton, who regards The Mask of Satan as his favourite horror film. It is one that has had profound influence on him and his work. The iron maiden scene of Sleepy Hollow (1999) is heavily influenced by this film’s opening, and speaking of The Mask of Satan, Burton said this:
“There’s a lot of old films — [Bava’s] in particular — where the vibe and the feeling is what it’s about… [t]he feeling’s a mixture of eroticism, of sex, of horror and starkness of image, and to me, that is more real than what most people would consider realism in films…”
The Mask of Satan is all vibe, all feeling. Because of this, it has all the makings of a cult horror. We have the undead moustachioed Eastern European villain — almost certainly modelled off Vlad the Impaler — whose preferred method of assassination is a conveniently placed trapdoor rather than a spike up the backside. And we are treated to some great old-fashioned special effects. A man’s flesh melts on a fire and a woman’s cloak is thrown aside to reveal rotting ribcage underneath for her body is all bones and decayed flesh.
Alain Silver and James Ursini write in their book, The Vampire Film:
“The world which Bava conveys … is a mutable one, composed of shifting contrasts and colors, of complements and atonalities, a world which moves like Spenser’s “ever-whirling wheel” from real to unreal and back again, from life to death and death to life in an unstable landscape of phantasmagorical sights and sounds.”
Bava’s Moldavia is pure phantasmagoria, where all the horrors of the psyche — sex, death and castles — come to fruition. Prints of the original film began with a producer’s warning that “the picture will shock you like no picture ever has,” that it may be “harmful to the young and impressionable.” By the social standard of the 1960s, The Mask of Satan was considered unusually gruesome, and was banned in the UK until 1968 because of its violence. And in the U.S., after some censorship of the gore, the film was given a theatrical release as a double feature alongside Roger Corman’s B-classic, The Little Shop of Horrors. Despite this, it was a worldwide critical and box office success, and launched the career of director Mario Bava into giallo stardom.
Of course they don’t make films like this one anymore. But there is something so enjoyable about unearthing these camp horrors and simultaneously marvelling at their irresistible gothic style, depicted through fantastically dated special effects. Horror films like this one are a time capsule of history’s psyche, and show how far the horror genre, and in fact cinema as an entire medium, has come.
