BARBARA STEELE: BLACK SUNDAY : LA MASCHERA EL DAIMO REVIEW AND PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY

CAST:

Barbara Steele (Katya/Princess Asa), John Richardson (Dr Andrej Gorobec), Andrea Checchi (Professor Choma Kruvajan), Arturo Dominici (Prince Ivo Javutich), Enrico Olivieri (Prince Constantine), Antonio Pierfederici (The Priest), Ivo Garrani (Prince Vajda), Tino Bianchi (Ivan)

PRODUCTION:

Director/Photography (b&w) – Mario Bava, Screenplay – Ennio De Concini & Mario Serandrei, English Language Dialogue – George Higgins III, Based on the Short Story The Vij by Nikolai Gogol, Producer – Massimo De Rita, Music – (Italian Version) Robert Nicolosi & (English Language Version) Les Baxter, Art Direction – Giorgio Giovannini. Production Company – Lina Productions/Galatea/Jolly Films.  Italy. 1960. 

SYNOPSIS:

In 17th Century Russia, Princess Asa is tried and convicted for vampirism and witchcraft. A mask with spikes on its inside is hammered over her face and she is burned at the stake. Two centuries later, the coach of Professor Choma Kruvajan and his companion Dr Andrej Gorobec crashes in the forest. They come upon the chapel that holds Asa’s coffin where she is kept imprisoned by the shadow of the cross coming through a window. Kruvajan accidentally revives Asa. They must then try to stop Asa as she attempts to possess her modern-day descendant Princess Katya

COMMENTARY:

Black Sunday is a genre classic. It was a success that produced a deluge of continental (primarily Italian) horror. Hammer had already fired up a massive Gothic revival with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958) in the previous three years and in the USA Roger Corman had had similar success with a series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. With Black Sunday, director Mario Bava defined a set the tropes that would become the continental Gothic formula. As opposed to Hammer’s product, the Italian horror film placed an emphasis on sadism, particularly facial mutilation; and as, opposed to the Anglo-horror film, which is very much rooted in the battle between reason and suppression, the continental Gothic became a genre that was based in the past (most Italo-horror films are set in the early 19th Century or earlier) and firmly on the side of superstition – science and reason never enter into these films, there is rarely ever a Man of Reason like Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing. There were many imitators through the 1960s – directors such as Riccardo Freda and Antonio Margheriti – making similar films set in large gloomy castles and featuring necrophiliac minglings of death and love. 

Most importantly, Black Sunday made Mario Bava a cult name with audiences. Bava had worked as a cinematographer and had purportedly (uncreditedly) directed several forgettable spaghetti Gothics – I Vampiri/The Devil’s Commandment (1957) and Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (1959) – before debuting with Black Sunday. Bava would then go onto a number of other Gothic horrors – Black Sabbath (1963), Night is the Phantom/What! (1963), Kill, Baby ... Kill!/Curse of the Living Dead (1966), Baron Blood (1972) – as well as giallo psycho-thrillers like Blood and Black Lace (1964), Blood Brides/Hatchet for a Honeymoon (1969) and Twitch of the Death Nerve/Bloodbath (1971). While many of these are excellent, Black Sunday would be a film that Bava never managed to subsequently surpass. 

It is almost impossible to gain an appreciation of Black Sunday’s atmosphere when seeing it on video – it needs a cinematic airing to give true voice to the extraordinary beauty of Mario Bava’s atmosphere and camerawork. For a period like 1960 when camera set-ups where still largely static, Bava’s camerawork is incredibly sinuous and fluid, always on the move. The shock opening with Barbara Steele being tied up, her back bared and the letter ‘S’ branded into her flesh, then the spiked Mask of Satan placed onto her face and hammered on with a crunch and a spurt of blood still holds some effect thirty years later. (It was this scene that had Black Sunday banned in the UK until 1968). What is most striking is Mario Bava’s instinctive feel for Gothic mood – the scene where the prince appears out of the shadows and approaches the bed of Ivo Garrani is almost pure Castle of Otranto (1764). The most extraordinary sequence in the film is the luring of the professor to the castle, which is filled with images like the black coach appearing out of the mist and racing through the forest in slow-motion with Arturo Dominici on top maniacally whipping the horses along; and the luring of the professor into the castle where Dominici and his lantern move further and further ahead, while giant embossed doors boom shut unaided by human hand, slowly trapping the professor deeper and deeper into a claustrophobic maze of underground passages. 

Although the film makes some claim to be based on the Nikolai Gogol short story The Vij (1835), there is virtually nothing of this in the finished script. The Vij was set around a night in a crypt as the hero waits for the witch to arise from her tomb while she marshals occult forces against him, a scene that is puzzlingly missing from the film. The main sequence of The Vij would have been perfect for the film’s extended climax, but is not used – in fact, the climax that Black Sunday has is oddly anti-climactic. In subsequent films, Mario Bava showed himself to be a director less concerned with plot than with visual set-pieces and this is probably the problem. The script here seems oddly unbalanced – it, for instance, makes mistakes like having the vampires engage in ordinary fistfights with the heroes, which rob them of their supernatural menace; it also jumbles vampires in with what should be a straight-forward reincarnated witch story. Nevertheless, Black Sunday is a classic. 

The film was purportedly remade as Black Sunday/The Mask of the Demon/Demons 5: The Devil’s Veil (1989) by Mario Bava’s son Lamberto, although this had almost nothing to do with the original here. The Nikolai Gogol story was more faithfully adapted as the Russian-made The Viy (1967) and the Yugoslav-made A Holy Place (1990). 

Mario Bava’s other genre films are:- the Greek muscleman fantasy Hercules in the Center of the Earth/Hercules vs the Vampires (1961); the giallo The Evil Eye (1962); the Gothic horror anthology Black Sabbath (1963); the Gothic horror Night is the Phantom/The Whip and the Body/What? (1963); the psycho-sexual thriller Blood and Black Lace (1964); the Gothic Kill Baby ... Kill/Curse of the Dead/Curse of the Living Dead/Operation Fear (1965); the sf/horror film Planet of the Vampires (1965); the spy comedy Dr Goldfoot and the Girls Bombs (1966), Bava’s worst film; the masked super-thief film Danger Diabolik (1967); the giallo Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970); the giallo Hatchet for a Honeymoon/Blood Brides (1971); the giallo Twitch of the Death Nerve/Bloodbath/A Bay of Blood/Carnage/Ecology for a Crime (1971); the Gothic Baron Blood (1972); the giallo/haunted house film Lisa and the Devil/House of Exorcism (1972); and the possession film Shock/Beyond the Door II (1977).      

Review: Richard Scheib

Images: Marcus Brooks

BARBARA STEELE: THE BARBARA STEELE GALLERY: HI RES PHOTOGRAPHS

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VINCENT PRICE BARBARA STEELE: PIT AND THE PENDULUM: HORROR THAT SWINGS WITH STYLE TO SPARE

CAST:

Vincent Price (Nicholas Medina/Sebastian Medina), John Kerr (Francis Barnard), Luana Anders (Catherine Medina), Anthony Carbone (Dr Charles Leon), Barbara Steele (Elizabeth Barnard Medina)

PRODUCTION:

Director/Producer – Roger Corman, Screenplay – Richard Matheson, Based on the Short Story by Edgar Allan Poe, Photography – Floyd Crosby, Music – Les Baxter, Photographic Effects – Butler-Glouner Inc & Ray Mercer, Special Effects – Pat Dinga, Makeup – Ted Coodley, Production Design – Daniel Haller. Production Company – AIP.

SYNOPSIS:
Spain in the year 1546. Upon the news of his sister Elizabeth’s death, Francis Barnard goes to pay respects to her husband, nobleman Nicholas Medina. Once there, Francis decides to stay on, dissatisfied with Medina’s lack of explanations about what happened to Elizabeth. As a child, Medina watched his grandfather, a member of the Spanish Inquisition, torture his mother and uncle to death. He is verging on madness, believing that he buried Elizabeth while she was still alive. Things happen to suggest that Elizabeth may still be alive and/or haunting the castle. Francis must decide whether the hauntings are real or the result of Medina’s tormented mind. When the ghost of Elizabeth reappears, Medina snaps and goes over the edge. Believing that he is now his grandfather, Medina imprisons Francis in a bladed pendulum torture device.

COMMENTARY:

The Pit and the Pendulum was the second of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, following The House of Usher (1960). (See below for Roger Corman’s other Edgar Allan Poe titles and films). Corman has reunited most of the creative team behind The House of Usher, including Vincent Price, screenwriter Richard Matheson, photographer Floyd Crosby, production designer Daniel Haller and musician Les Baxter. This time he has also recruited Barbara Steele, who made a striking appearance as the reincarnated witch in Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960) around the same time that The House of Usher came out.

  

Along with The Masque of the Red Death (1964), Pit and the Pendulum is usually the fan favourite among Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films. However, it does feel overshadowed by the success of The House of Usher, as though Corman and Richard Matheson felt like they were under pressure to make another Usher. The plot draws heavily draws upon The House of Usher – again an ordinary man travels to Vincent Price’s foreboding house in search of a woman who is close to him and has to force his way into the household against the unwelcome he encounters; the house and sanity of its owner is interwound and clearly crumbling; there is talk of the physical presence of the house where the depravities of the past have created a physical evil that affects the inhabitants/descendants in the present day; Vincent Price is cast as a tormented character crushed by the weight of his fears; and there is another premature burial plot. (Not that this is any different from the rest of the films in the Poe series – at times, it seemed as though Roger Corman and Richard Matheson merely shuffled around the themes and gave the characters different names). 

Notedly in contrast to the film here, the Edgar Allan Poe short story The Pit and the Pendulum (1850) is a mood piece in which the unnamed narrator finds himself in a cell after sentence by The Inquisition where he is slowly tortured by a descending bladed pendulum. The story consists of little more than the narrator’s fear and terror as the blade scrapes closer to his body over a matter of days. There is little background to the original story, no explanation of how the narrator came to be there, while the end of the story delivers an abrupt deus ex machina salvation that occurs in a single paragraph. All the rest of the plot that takes place in the film has been invented by Richard Matheson. To such extent, the title of the film feels like a cheat – all that corresponds to the short story has been crammed into about the last twenty minutes of the film; and even there it is largely removed from much of the slim context that Poe gave in the story. 

There is no torturer in the original, just the narrator being tortured in the cell as the pendulum descends. Much of the story also takes place with the cell in total darkness, which has necessarily been changed here due to the uncinematic problems that this presents. The Poe story is a masterpiece in terms of conjuring fear, terror and impending dread. Most of the film adaptations of The Pit and the Pendulum make it solely about a unique torture instrument and fail to discover any of the internal psychological torment that is the essence of the story. In fact, the big story twist in Pit and the Pendulum feels as though Corman and Matheson were attempting to graft Poe onto a Les Diaboliques (1955)-styled psycho-thriller. The plot of Les Diaboliques with its elaborately staged contrivations to drive someone mad was just starting to be imitated by the likes of William Castle and Hammer Films. However, incorporated here, such a plot sits somewhat at odds with Poe’s brooding, tortured mood.  

 

On the directorial front, Roger Corman drums up a good deal of thunderous atmosphere. The sets are expectedly lush – the doom-laden labyrinthine house interiors and the massive dungeon are good, the colour and set dressings are so drenched in midnight blue that the colour almost seems to be running down the screen. Despite this, Pit and the Pendulum is often slow moving – it takes three-quarters of the running time before it fully gets going. Nevertheless, when Corman finally plays his hand in the last quarter, the film works well – Barbara Steele’s emergence from the tomb and pursuit of Vincent Price is good. The pendulum makes for a good climax and the darkly ironic final shot holds a sting. Barbara Steele is certainly an interesting casting choice, her Romantic looks and alabaster beauty hide a nice otherworldly chill – unfortunately, Roger Corman fails to make substantial use of her here in the way that the Italian directors who turned her into a cult figure during the 1960s managed to.

Other versions of the Edgar Allan Poe story have been Alice Guy-Blache’s French lost silent short The Pit and the Pendulum (1913); The Pit (1962), a British short film adaptation; Stuart Gordon’s campy The Pit and the Pendulum (1991), which was also set during The Inquisition; and The Pit & the Pendulum (2009) from low-budget hack David DeCoteau.

Roger Corman’s other Edgar Allan Poe films are The House of Usher/The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), Premature Burial (1962), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), the Poe-titled but H.P. Lovecraft adapted The Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964).  

Roger Corman’s other genre films as director are:– Day the World Ended (1955), It Conquered the World (1956), Not Of This Earth (1956), War of the Satellites (1956), Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Journey to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (1957), The Undead (1957), Teenage Caveman (1958), A Bucket of Blood (1959), The Wasp Woman (1959), Last Woman on Earth (1960), The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961), Tower of London (1962), The Terror (1963), X – The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963), The Trip (1967), Gas; or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (1970) and Frankenstein Unbound (1990). Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (2011) is a documentary about Corman’s career.
 
Review: Richard Scheib
Images: Marcus Brooks