Italian terror maestro Mario Bava’s Black Sunday is a gothic masterpiece, a haunting and atmospheric tale of dread that lies between European art film and classic Universal horror. When the mesmerizing Barbara Steele is condemned and executed as a witch, she vows revenge, curses her killers’ descendants and rises from the grave centuries later to keep her chilling promises.
“For students of horror, 1960 is remembered as the year of Peeping Tomand Psycho. But Mario Bava’s monochrome masterpiece Black Sunday fully deserves to be set alongside them: while Hitchcock and Powell were revolutionising the genre by bringing the terror closer to home, Bava was doing almost the opposite, creating a boldly imaginative and dreamlike world inspired by the Universal classics, while at the same time using groundbreaking special effects to ensure that the horrors depicted on screen were more graphically disturbing than ever before.” – Tom Huddleston, Time Out
