Black Sunday
Black Sunday is a 1960 film from Italy, directed by Mario Bava, running 87 minutes. reelscum files it under euro-gothic.
- Year
- 1960 · 1960s films
- Country
- Italy
- Runtime
- 87 min
- Director
- Mario Bava
- Updated
- 29 Oct 2026
- Obscurity
- known (18/100)
- Also known as
- Mask of the Demon · Revenge of the Vampire · The Mask of Satan
Defined in the glossary: Euro-gothic
Bava's debut as director. Barbara Steele and a mask full of spikes.
Mario Bava's debut as director, and one of the most beautiful horror films ever shot in black and white. A witch executed with a spiked mask hammered onto her face returns two centuries later, and Barbara Steele plays both the witch and her descendant with the same unforgettable eyes.
Bava lit and shot it himself, which is why the fog, the candlelight and the crumbling crypts do so much more than the budget should allow. It made Steele a horror icon and set the template for Italian gothic.
Atmosphere as pure craft. Still eerie.
Trailer
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The cycle in depth
- Fantaterror: the Spanish horror boom, 1968 to 1976
Two cuts of every film, one for the censor in Madrid and one for the drive-in. Democracy killed the trick in two years.
On these lists
- Euro-gothic for the giallo graduate
The graduate course after the giallo: cobwebbed castles and a dead woman who will not stay buried, lit by Bava like nobody since.
Filed alongside
Inferno
Argento's sequel to Suspiria. Even less plot, even more colour. A building that is alive.
The Curse of Frankenstein
The film that built Hammer, in blood-red colour the censors hated.
Black Sabbath
Three stories, one Karloff. The Wurdulak segment is the best thing Bava shot.
Vampyros Lesbos
Franco's most watchable. The soundtrack outlived the film by decades.
The Vampire Lovers
Hammer clocks that the censors have loosened and sends Ingrid Pitt to make the most of it.
Hercules in the Haunted World
Bava shoots Hades in gel colours. Looks like nothing else in the cycle.
Dr. Terror's House of Horrors
The film that invented the Amicus anthology, dealt out as tarot on a train.
The House That Dripped Blood
Four Robert Bloch stories, Cushing and Lee on hand, and barely a drop of the title's blood.
I Vampiri
Freda walked off Italy's first sound horror; Bava finished it. The whole euro-gothic shelf starts here.
The Whip and the Body
Bava and Christopher Lee doing sadomasochism the censors did not catch.
Planet of the Vampires
Bava builds an alien planet out of fog and two rocks, and Alien quietly borrowed the skeleton.
The Awful Dr. Orlof
Where the entire Franco machine started. Everything he made for forty years is in here somewhere.