Introduction
Horror-based witches only started to appear in earnest in the horror film genre from 1960 (Hutchings, 2008:338). Häxan as discussed in the previous chapter was the point of origin for the witch horror film tropes and influenced the horror film genre, but it was not technically a horror film as it did not follow the narrative structure or conventions of a proper feature film and was more similar to a documentary in some respects. Häxan is composed out of short fictional vignettes that serve as frames connecting lectures about witches. The characters in Häxan are one-dimensional and have no
character development, nor does the film follow a well-developed plot like latter day films do.
The first proper witch horror film was Mario Bava’s directorial28 debut La Maschera del Demonio (1960), or Black Sunday29 as it is known in the United States of America (Hutchings, 2008:338). The film is considered by many as one of the most stylised horror films ever produced (Conterio,
2015:63). Like Häxan, Black Sunday drew inspiration from religious iconography, fairy tale
illustrations, and other works of fiction, with Nikolai Gogol’s gothic horror novella Viy (1835) being the most prominent source of inspiration (Lucas, 2007:16, 115, 319). Viy (1835) is a story about a witch who exacts revenge on a young philosopher after he nearly beats her to death. The story, like Black Sunday, is filled with sexual allusions and was inspired by European folklore and religion (Connolly, 2002:253).
Black Sunday is referred to as the bridge between the adolescent classic horror cinema of the 1930s (the aforementioned horror films based on classic novels popularised by Universal Studios at the time) and the more well-known cinematic conventions in the horror genre we know today (as initiated by Hammer Films in the 1950s) aimed at more sophisticated audiences (Hughes, 2013; Lucas,
2007:21, 23). Producing a horror film for mature audiences, seems like a corrective exercise on Bava’s part which makes the film as a whole an example of Bloom’s clinamen. In addition, it perfectly marries the fairy tale and the surreal through its expert use of mise-en-scéne (Conterio, 2015:63). The film expanded on the horror conventions hinted at in the Hammer Films productions and took the genre into the art film domain (Lucas, 2007:23, 24, 327). The film retains recognisable elements related to the horror film genre, but it is elevated due to Bava’s technical prowess. By elevating it to art film status the film can also be described as an example of Bloom’s tesserae.
This gothic and modernist film was an international sensation at the time and Bava would ultimately follow it up with a bevy of similar gothic films which in turn laid the foundations for Italian horror
28 Black Sunday was Bava’s first credited work as a director. He unofficially directed Caltiki the Immortal Monster in 1959 (Lucas, 2007:16).
29 The title Black Sunday is used in the rest of this thesis as it is more widely recognised under the title.
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cinema that would remain popular internationally until 1980 (Hughes, 2013, Lucas, 2007:16, 23).
Bava is often referred to as the Italian Alfred Hitchcock and the ‘Master of Italian Horror’ by his peers with even Martin Scorsese praising his prowess as director (Hughes, 2013; Lucas, 2007:13, 16).
Despite the film’s numerous accolades, it was ill-received by critics and censors in the United Kingdom and the United States of America (like Häxan) due to the scenes of violence, torture, nude female bodies, and corpses (Lucas, 2007:16, 23). The film was subsequently excessively edited, censored, and redubbed for its US-release (Lucas, 2007:16, 23). When compared to excesses found in modern-day horror films, Black Sunday seems tame and dated. It has a pronounced gothic ambience, however, which is often absent from latter day horror films.
As mentioned, while the American horror films were aimed at a juvenile audience, Bava’s Black Sunday was meant for a mature and sophisticated audience. The sophisticated horror film was unheard of at the time in the USA (Lucas, 2007:23). The film fared even worse in the United Kingdom as the edited US version was banned by the British Board of Film Censors in 1961 (Lucas, 2007:317). The film was well-received in Italy, even more so in some other Europe countries, like Belgium, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Spain, and Sweden without any censorship or post-editing (Lucas,
2007:282). Black Sunday thus shares many similarities with Häxan where the reception and
censorship of the films were concerned. Both films were widely accepted through Europe, but had to be censored for the audiences in the United Kingdom and the United States of America.
Black Sunday has a simple plot that starts with a woman, Asa Vajda (Barbara Steele), the daughter of Prince Vajda of Maldovia, accused by her brother, Griabby Vajda, the Grand Inquisitor in the year 1630, for associating with the Devil’s servants. Her crimes are unclear and not expanded on in the scene with the exception of her brother stating that she is repudiated for her association and
‘monstrous love’ for Igor Juvatich. Her scantily clad body is tied to a wooden stake and her naked shoulder is branded with the mark of Satan – a branding iron with the shape of an “S” at its end.
Before an iron mask with long spikes on the inside is hammered onto her face, she curses her brother and his male lineage. As the villagers attempt to burn her at the stake, a storm breaks loose making it impossible for them to complete their task. It is not revealed exactly what kills Asa, but from the length of the spikes inside the mask that is hammered to her face, it is safe to assume that it was the mask that killed her. Her remains are buried in an ancestral tomb from which she is resurrected two centuries later.
The rest of the film centres on the resurrection of Asa. Dr. Kruvajan and Dr. Andrej Gorobec are on their way to a conference when their coach breaks down. While waiting for the coachmen to repair the wheel, the doctors explore a nearby ancient crypt containing Asa’s remains. She is inadvertently resurrected when Doctor Kruvajan is attacked by a bat and he cuts his hand on a glass panel above Asa’s face. Drops of blood fall in an empty eye socket and she is soon sufficiently revived to
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reanimate her dead lover, Juvatich. Juvatich later lures Dr. Kruvajan to the crypt where Asa hypnotises him and he kills the current Prince30 Vajda, father of Princess Katia Vajda, and Prince Constantine Vajda. Juvatich, however, only seemingly kills the prince and he is later found battered and broken in a hidden passageway. Dr. Kruvajan is also slain by Juvatich after which he kidnaps the princess at Asa’s behest and brings her to the crypt where Asa lays.
Asa tries to absorb the life force and youth of Princess Katia Vajda through supernatural means in an attempt to take her place and to enjoy the freedoms which were denied to her centuries ago. She does not succeed in the end and is thwarted by a crucifix pendent around Katia’s neck. Katia is
unconscious as the pendent is exposed around her neck, causing Asa to recoil. The villagers then storm the crypt and the film ends with Asa being burned at the stake.
Literature review
Black Sunday has received very little critical attention from scholars since its release. With the exception of Martyn Conterio’s book, Black Sunday (2015), the only other studies available are three books on Mario Bava’s oeuvre.
The first of the texts dealing with Bava’s oeuvre is Tim Lucas’s Mario Bava: All the Colours of the Dark (2007) which is the most comprehensive and detailed text on Mario Bava ever produced. The nearly 1200 page tome opens with an introduction by Martin Scorsese. In this introduction Scorsese lauds Bava’s skill at capturing dream-like atmospheres on celluloid (Scorsese, 2007:13). He mentions Black Sunday by name and expresses his admiration for the film (Scorsese, 2007:13). Other notable directors (and the specific films which were inspired by Bava) having admitted to being influenced by Bava are: Alejandro Amenåbar’s The Others (2002), Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), Sleepy Hollow (1999), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), and Corpse Bride (2005), Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Roman Coppola’s CQ (2001), Roger Corman’s Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984) and Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), Ernest Dickerson’s Bones (2001), Sam Raimi’s television series Hercules the Legendary Journeys (1995), and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) (Conterio, 2015:85-88; Lucas, 2007:23, 26, 326-327, 511, 1037-1039). Roger Corman was so enchanted with Black Sunday that he would go on to imitate Bava’s cinematic style for his own film, The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), going so far as to cast Barbara Steele as the antagonist. Corman’s The Raven (1963), The Haunted Palace (1963), and The Masque of the Red Death (1964) all also share overt stylistic similarities with Black Sunday (1960)Black Sunday (Lucas, 2007:26). Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964), along with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), are credited as starting the so-called slasher film genre which
30 There is no king or queen mentioned and father and children all share the moniker of prince or princess.
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would later dominate the horror film industry during the 1980s (Lucas, 2007:544, Mason, 2014). It would therefore be disingenuous not to acknowledge Bava as a powerhouse of influence. His cinematic style reverberates through many films to this very day with Black Sunday dominating as a template to imitate.
Lucas’s book is an exhaustive collection featuring a detailed biography of Bava, as well as a complete history of each film credited to him. It includes intimate details about the production and reception of every film, film stills, promotional material and posters from different countries, as well as biographic info of the cast and crew that worked with Bava on each film. Numerous anecdotes litter the chapters which flesh out the production contexts of Bava’s entire filmography. There is however little critical engagement with the films with the exception of descriptions of Bava’s gothic cinematic style as well as his obsession with colour and colour pallets. Lucas (2007:23) argues that Bava was interested in exploring the subconscious or the unconscious with his films gradually becoming more existential as the 1960s progressed. For Bava it was more about the truth of a moment being felt through the use of colour, textures, and mise-en-scène (Lucas, 2007:23). The characters and script were thus secondary to the lighting, camera techniques, and set arrangements which were used to capture the truth of a moment to be felt by the audience as opposed to being understood (Lucan, 2007:23). The idea was not to have a complicated story, but to evoke a dream-like atmosphere in the viewer (Lucas, 2007:327).
Inspired by the black and white horror films produced by Hammer Films in the 1950s, Bava chose to shoot Black Sunday in black and white, despite his investors’ preference for Technicolor (Lucas, 2007:283, 296). Bava argued that a black and white colour pallet would be better suited to the Gothic sensibilities he was trying to capture in the film, the same sensibilities found in the aforementioned gothic novel, Viy (1835), that inspired Black Sunday in the first place (Lucas, 2007:23, 296). Some of the transformation effects in the film would also not have been possible if it was shot in colour (Lucas, 2007:296). Interestingly, Bava used colour gel lighting while filming Black Sunday to create a specific stage mood for the actors, but also to capture nuanced grey scale tonalities which natural lighting could not provide (Lucas, 2007:296).
Hammer Films did not just inspire Black Sunday’s (1960) colour pallet. The antagonists, Asa and Juvatich, were both modelled after the vampires found in 1950s Hammer horror films (Lucas,
2007:283, 297). Even the original Italian title for the film, La Maschera del Demonio, was inspired by the Italian titles of popular Hammer films La Maschera Di Cera/House of Wax (1953) and La
Mashera di Frankenstein/The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) (Lucas, 2007:283). There were also other instances in Bava’s films where he admits the influence of Hammer Films, like in Caltiki Il Mostro Immortale (1959) (Lucas 2007:255). In time, however, Hammer Films would start to imitate Bava’s more complex and intellectual approach to horror and mystery, especially after the release of Bava’s
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Operazione Paura/ Kill, Baby…Kill (1966) (Lucas 2007:673).31 Lucas (2007:21) argues that the directors employed by Hammer Films were not known for experimenting with film. Also, the violent scenes in their films were, though graphic, rather clinical (Lucas, 2007:21). Bava mimicked the gothic style of the Hammer Films productions, but expanded on it by experimenting with colour and
obsessing about every detail in every set. Lucas (2007:21) states:
It was not the ugly things in his films that frightened audiences; instead, Bava unnerved them with instances of beauty, poetry, symmetry, inverted imagery, metaphysics, mysticism, and above all, color. Color of abnormal intensity. Color that drew the eye to places it would not normally wish to linger. Color that shouted or whispered warnings. Color that did not
belong—that, in a realistic setting, could not possibly be there, thus intimating the presence of the supernatural.
Bava used set designs and colour to create dreamlike atmospheres in his films. Where other directors attempted to shock audiences with blood and gore, Bava created tension by juxtaposing scenes of murderous mayhem with meticulously designed sets with exaggerated, even garish, lighting.
The most compelling argument that Lucas (2007:319) makes regarding Black Sunday is that Asa Vajda is the first truly female monster in the history of the horror film. Unlike other female monsters who predated her and who were divorced from the female gender and unattractive, Asa Vajda has agency, drips sensuality, and is a complex and thoroughly developed female character (Lucas,
2007:320). I found this especially true when comparing Barbara Steele’s performance as Asa with her performance of Princess Katia. Princess Katia is a shallow, pathetic, and virginal character who resembles the typical Hollywood paramours of the male heroes of the time, while Asa is vicious, sensual, and has dominion over men, and not just in one point in time but over the stretch of 200 years while rotting away in a crypt. I was confounded by the final scenes where Asa is burned at the stake as Katia’s demeanour seems to change in her last scene to mirror Asa’s. This led me to wonder if Asa had not succeeded. Steele’s portrayal of Asa was so visceral that it led to fame and producers
clamouring to cast her as an antagonist in numerous horror films (Lucas, 2007:322). Fellini even cast her as a supporting character in his monumental 8½ (1963) (Lucas, 2007:322). Lucas (2007:322) describes Barbara Steele’s character in the following terms: “…the seductive allure of superstition, the beauty at the heart of darkness.” Asa can consequently be seen as the embodiment of sex and death combined into a beautiful woman who most heterosexual men would undoubtedly crave and fear.
31 Kill, Baby…Kill (1966) is Bava’s second most influential film (Lucas, 2007:683). The film also stars a female monster, but this time in the form of a child who appears to adults and drives them to commit suicide. The film features Bava’s signature exaggerated use of colour and meticulously designed sets. Fellini also drew inspiration for his Toby Dammit (1968) from this film (Lucas, 2007:33).
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Considering the abovementioned, it becomes clear that Asa conforms to the Dionysian prototype described by Paglia. According to Paglia, as discussed in the section on Häxan, woman is aligned with Dionysus because Dionysus is the god of fertility and nature, but also because of the liquids associated with the female body. Like Dionysus, Asa is feminine, wanton, deadly, and connected with the abject (coffins, corpses, rotting flesh). Asa is one more ripple in the pond that sprang forth first from Greek mythology, then Roman mythology, and followed by European folklore, Catholicism, and Häxan.
Howard Hughes’s Mario Bava: Destination Terror (2013) mirrors much of the content of Lucas’s text, but on a smaller scale. He also draws attention to the cinematic importance of Black Sunday and the same focus of style over content (Hughes, 2013). He suggests the same parallels between Black Sunday and the Universal Studios and Hammer Films’s productions (Hughes, 2013). Hughes’s book is however far less thorough and reads like cliff notes for Lucas’s Mario Bava: All the Colours of the Dark (2007).
Similar in scope to the Hughes book is Troy Howarth’s The Haunted World of Mario Bava (2018).
Howarth, like Hughes and Lucas, mentions the boundaries between sex and death which Bava traversed and at times ignored (Howarth, 2018). Some sections of the book seem as if he copied the most interesting sections from the Lucas book. Howarth’s text adds very little to the history or study of Bava’s oeuvre.
Martyn Conterio’s book, Black Sunday (2015), is part of the Devil’s Advocates books series which explores a different horror film with each subsequent book. Conterio’s book fills the gaps related to intertextuality and scholarly analysis of Black Sunday that is found to a lesser extent in Lucas’s book.
Conterio offers the reader a concise view of the real world context of 1660 and how it aids the opening scenes of Black Sunday where Asa is branded and tortured. Like in the case of Christensen’s Häxan, Black Sunday mirrors a historical milieu when the supernatural was real to people as opposed to being an invention or reflection of society and culture (Conterio, 2015:53). He also supports other scholars’ view that witchcraft was invented by the Inquisition in an attempt to stamp out other pagan ideologies that posed a threat to their power (Conterio, 2015:53).
Conterio (2015:55) makes an interesting observation regarding the invented back stories which inform films. As mentioned, Black Sunday was influenced by Gogol’s Viy (1835). Viy (1835) was similarly inspired by popular folklore and legend which served as the context for the story (Conterio, 2015:55).
Black Sunday follows suit, as does Häxan as both films explicitly mention other texts as influencing the narrative. The films, in other words, create a bridge between the present day and mythological and supernatural contexts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and earlier where people believed in gods, demons, monsters, and where witches were considered fact. Conterio (2015:55) draws
similarities regarding created fictional mythologies which serve as a back story in Black Sunday and
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The Blair Witch Project (1999). This is a common trope found in horror films that deal with
supernatural elements of witchcraft where specifically in the case of witch horror films, the narrative frequently harkens back to the early 1600s.
This was an interesting discovery to make and one that I missed while compiling my own list of tropes in the chapter on Häxan. Invented mythologies are consequently added to my initial list of eight tropes. I am also using this as an opportunity to make the reader aware that similar instances might be included in the next chapters of this thesis.
Conterio’s analysis of the film’s lighting is also informative. He notes how Bava used lighting on the inside of a building to create a feeling of openness, while he employed chiaroscuro to create menacing and claustrophobic exterior shots (2015:64).
Another compelling observation that Conterio (2015:67) makes is that the camera dwells and zooms in on the horrific maimed face of Asa, a woman, while the mutilated male face is only shown at a distance and for a mere second. Barbara Steele’s face in pain and/or suffering is eroticised while her beauty in other scenes is captivating (Conterio, 2015:67). This contributes to the aforementioned duality of Asa/Katia and sex/death. At the same time the male characters in the film are never shot or portrayed in similar ways which suggests the influence of the male gaze.
According to Conterio (2015:70-71) the mask plays an important role as narrative device. He suggests that the mask that is hammered to Asa’s head resembles a grotesque parody of what Satan’s face might look like (Conterio, 2015:71). The mask also acts as a device of misogyny as the mask denies the viewer access to Asa’s feminine and beautiful face, destroying any connection she might have with others (Conterio, 2015:71). The mask also serves as a talisman in many cultures to ward off evil spirits (Conterio, 2015:70). It thus not only negates interpersonal relationships, but also other evil spirits, meaning that Asa is isolated from spiritual sources of power, namely the demonic entities or devils that give her power.
Conterio observes that there is the extent to which Asa and Katia embody sex and death. Conterio (2015:74) draws similarities between Barbara Steele’s portrayal of Asa and Katia and Lucy Westenra in Bram Stoker’s Dracula where the women fluctuate between pure and sweet and the cruel and wanton. Personally, I found Barbara Steele’s Asa/Katia akin to the way Dark Romanticism, a sub- genre of the Gothic, explored and linked beauty/pleasure with death/suffering (Nyman, 1998:23). One of the central tenets of the Dark Romantics was their interest in death and how death and things associated with it, like graveyards and mausoleums, are beautiful (Nyman, 1998:23). The Dark Romantics relished in that which produced pain, horror, and sadness (Nyman, 1998:27). I experience the same conflicting emotions with regard to Asa and Katia as she both demands my attention while simultaneously repelling me. The film’s meticulously designed sets and arrangements coupled with