Welcome to Folk Horror Friday!
Over the summer I’ll be reviewing Folk Horror cinema every Friday! I’ll investigate both canonical Folk Horror classics like the Unholy Trinity as well as obscure gems from the era of silent movies. As always, I am guided in this trek by Adam Scovell’s timeline of Folk Horror cinema, which appears in Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (2017).
Up this week is Mario Bava’s Italian Gothic classic, Black Sunday (The Mask of Satan) (1960).
DVD Blurb:
A vengeful witch and her fiendish servant return from the grave and begin a bloody campaign to possess the body of the witch’s beautiful look-alike descendant, with only the girl’s brother and a handsome doctor standing in her way.
Original Italian poster.
The story here is not terribly original, but the film simply drips with Spooky, moonlit atmosphere. It’s worth watching just for the 360-degree pans of the crypt below the ruined chapel showcased after the film’s cold open flashback. Black Sunday hits all the right Gothic tropes: ruins, Spooky castles with secret passages, family curses, diabolism, and hints of the Inquisition.
So, why is this film featured for Folk Horror Friday?
Since Folk Horror Friday largely treads the path set out by Scovell, it’s in here because it’s in his filmography. While Black Sunday is certainly an excellent example of a Gothic film, Scovell doesn’t list it as Folk Horror per se; rather, he sees in it elements that will come to the fore later in the decade.
Scovell sees a connection to Hauntology here, in that Black Sunday points the way toward the “lost vision of a pagan free-love utopia” that runs through much Folk Horror. Occultism is a big part of this aesthetic. The link between Black Sunday and Folk Horror, for Scovell, is the way in which Black Sunday represents the “darker, macabre aspects of occult practice” from which the “slow but enjoyable shift into sleazier territory” of pulpy occult films took place. Beyond recognizing the “lavish horror” of this “lurid, Gothic tale,” Scovell sees in Black Sunday a recognizable origin for later occult films such as The Devil’s Hand (1961), Witchcraft (1964), Devils of Darkness (1965), The Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968), and The Witchmaker (1969) (133).
Having not seen those movies yet, I can’t evaluate Scovell’s interpretation of cinematic history and influence here, but I did enjoy Black Sunday as a Gothic horror film. The cinematography is fantastic, and the sets left me sighing with Romantic pleasure. I like my Spooky cinema and literature for its atmosphere, and Black Sunday delivers.
The film nails its Gothic tropes. The narrative action begins with a carriage accident, which has been a Gothic trope since at least Ann Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest (1791). The moonlit ruins, complete with mist, cobweb, and what looks like a small swamp, are fully faithful to the Gothic vision, and the film properly understands that atmosphere is central to the Gothic.
Certainly. The feeling of unease within these ruins must be due to the wind whistling through these old pipes.
Visual space is managed very well in the film. Characters interact with the physical environment in ways less often captured in modern horror’s predilection fo
r green screens: Professor Kruvajan frequently beats back cobwebs or branches with his walking stick, and the use of angle and shadows gives the sets a sense of depth. The protagonists discover the door to a subterranean crypt in the midst of a ruined chapel, and the crypt feels subterranean when they enter it due to the camera’s position at floor level looking toward the staircase as the characters descend.
The lighting and shadow is extraordinary in Black Sunday.
The film also does very well as a horror film, again due to the camera work. In the cold open, Princess Asa Vajda is tied to a stake and branded with the mark of Satan. Presumably using wax prosthetics, the flesh bubbles and melts in a way not quite convincing, but vastly more believable than a modern CGI version would have been.
When the Mask of Satan—a hideous mask whose interior is lined with spikes like an Iron Maiden—is being prepared for Vajda’s face, the way the mask’s full horror is revealed is clever: several shots show the mask sitting on the ground, but when it is finally picked up to apply to Vajda, the viewer only belatedly is shown the spikes on the underside of the mask. The experience of the reveal for me was sobering, and that’s unusual in a film.
Even more chilling, when the mask’s properties are revealed, the camera subtly performs a shift that radically repositions the viewer in the scene. As the interior is first revealed and the mask is turned to face the camera, the viewpoint follows the mask and retreats, as if recoiling in horror, particularly as the executioner holds it up and begins advancing directly toward the camera. The movements accurately map the experience of someone backing up to get away from the man holding the mask. Briefly, the viewer is positioned not as a spectator but a victim.
Then, as the mask is placed directly over the camera lens, the view reverses without changing position: the viewer is looking at the front of the mask as it advances toward Vajda. Now the viewer is made uncomfortably complicit, in the sense that the viewer has been shown from a first-person perspective what is about to happen, and now positions the viewer as the one holding the mask. Despite it being such a simple concept, the camera work successfully creates a visceral jolt of horror that would be only intellectual otherwise. When the mask is finally secured to her face by a mallet, even the jaded might feel queasy.
So: the summer will see how genuine the film’s place in the cinematic history of Folk Horror, but this is certainly a film that belongs in the canon of Gothic cinema, and is well worth a watch for an enjoyable Gothic evening!
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As a photographer and past TV camera operator, I love how you see and interpret what is going on with the camera and it’s various angles. Your descriptions of the camera from the perspective of the victim when the sharp points are revealed inside the helmet is horrifying! And I haven’t even seen that film yet! That the helmet is then placed on her head with a mallet is beyond chilling… Thanks for your review of the film Josh.