When shown in American cinemas, the 1960 Italian horror film Las Maschera del Demonio, ran with a disclaimer that the film would shock audience like no other and should not be seen by children under twelve. This was after three minutes of gore had been edited out of the film, and some of the satanic references had been removed, including the translated title “The Mask of Satan.” The film was released as Black Sunday.
In the following half a century, Black Sunday has lost some of its power to shock, so I tried to imagine watching it through the eyes of my eleven-year old self, perhaps having caught it on TV late at night. There are images here, of witches being tortured, people burning alive, corpses rising from the earth and maggots crawling around in the eye socket of a formerly beautiful women, that would have made for feverish talk on the playground the next day at school. All the talk of Satan would have certainly deeply unsettled me as a child and kept me awake for reasons I would have been unable to explain.
Watching this movie about a week after Eraserhead I couldn’t help but compare the two films. Both of them derive their power from strange, disturbing images that relate to each other more like in a dream than in a story bound by logic. Black Sunday has most of the trappings of a traditional narrative film, but none of it really holds together in the clear light of day. It throws around potent images and symbols too quickly for the audience to really be able to make sense of it all, but the feeling you’re left with, provided you can turn off your 21st century brain, is dread rather than confusion. Like in Eraserhead, there are enough things here that connect subconsciously and emotionally that “making sense” doesn’t seem to matter.
Black Sunday boasts some great, grisly special effects and inspired production design, though perhaps its biggest visual treat is the face of Barbara Steele, which is at once alluring and somehow unnerving, beautiful but slightly askew. She is instantly recognizable, which makes a few plot points more plausible and also made for some awesome movie posters.
Steele gives quite a good performance as well, a bit schlocky perhaps, but well beyond what most of the other actors deliver. Of course, the fact that everyone’s voice has been obviously overdubbed, mostly with anachronistic American accents, doesn’t do the film a lot of favors. Ultimately, there are too many places where the seams of this movie shows, from a few dodgy makeup and costuming jobs, to obviously rubber effects, to a score that distracts more than it connects.
The cumulative effect is too many reminders that you’re watching a film, and one that was probably made with not enough time or enough money, which is one of the reasons that Black Sunday isn’t as immersive as Eraserhead.
Few films hit as hard as Eraserhead, though, and Black Sunday still has plenty of creepy scenes of horror that can’t easily be forgotten … especially for those under twelve.
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