Black Sunday

Barbara Steele is the only actress capable of "snarling with her eyelids" -- at least, so said some wag about her Italian horror films. In Mario Bava's debut picture, Black Sunday, she is having a bad day -- branded first with a red-hot iron bearing Satan's initial ("S" if you need to ask), an executioner clamps a massive bronze mask of Satan spiked on the inside with five-inch barbs and, then, pounds it into her skull with a metal hammer-head the size of coke liter bottle. Blood fountains, mists swirl, lightning streaks the sky, and rainfall preserves the witche's corpse, bound to the sodden stake, to walk again. Bava was a master of creating atmosphere from minimal means -- a little dry ice, a cob web, some mirrors and drapery, and a fallen column. In Hercules in the Haunted World, a technicolor fantasia, he conjures up an entire classical Walpurgisnacht of mythical beasts and heros from some gaunze, tin-foil, and a wheel of colored lights. More sober, the black and white Black Sunday is a treasure trove of interesting in-camera special effects -- matte trees conjure a tangled black forest, spectres materialize, and a phantom coach glides through the mist in slow-motion. Bava has an astounding technique that suggests aging by painting age-lines on an actress' face, then, changing the color tone from red to blue to show the lines magically emerging from otherwise clear and smooth skin -- the indispensable commentary notes that this technique was first used in the scene of the healing of the lepers in the silent Ben Hur. Whatever it's vintage, this effect is one that I had not seen before and it is both subtle and astounding -- you look for the evidence of time-lapse photography but there is none: the transformation is completely seamless. Of course, the greatest special effect in the film is Barbara Steele's alarming and doll-like face -- the actress had huge, staring eyes and with her face perforated by spike wounds and her torso a mass of knotted corruption, she is a genuinely terriftying sight. Horror was her natural metier -- she registers paralyzed, numb, stark horror even in her love scenes; somehow, she is both the cause of horror and its effect. Steele's beauty is uncanny, unnatural, at the very verge of toppling over into the rigor mortis of a mannequin. I don't know whether she can act -- it doesn't matter. Similarly, the plot doesn't matter; it's a melange of blood-sucking vampires, empty eye-sockets magically filling with eyes (an effect achieved with a skull and poached eggs), incest, necrophilia, and lots of eye-piercing.with obligatory spurts of blood. Good clean fun as long as you don't take it too seriously. There's something horribly sexual about all this, some kind of sadism best not to acknowledge -- best to enjoy the spectacle and shut off the mind.