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Last October Savant reviewed a Kino Classics double bill of Black Sunday and Black Sabbath, in their original U.S. versions as released by American-International Pictures in 1961 and 1963. The release was canceled almost before the screener arrived, reportedly due to unforeseen 'contractual issues'. Black Sabbath is expected later in the year, but Kino Classics finally now has a single of just Black Sunday out, in glorious B&W. 
For the last sixteen years or so the film that launched Mario Bava as a director and Barbara Steele as the horror queen of the 1960s has mostly been seen in an 'in-between' form, as the export version The Mask of Satan. I first wrote about it in an MGM Video Savant essay from 1998 called Censorship for a celebrated Horror Film, using censor correspondence found in the files at MGM. Thanks to interest in Tim Lucas' original commentary, and through the help of then- Image Entertainment staffer Nathaniel Thompson, I reviewed the first Black Sunday DVD in 1999. Reissues eventually followed: Anchor Bay in 2007, Kino in 2012 (Blu-ray). Let me refer readers to my review of last October's cancelled combo Blu-ray of Black Sunday and Black Sabbath for the basic details and differences in the European and A.I.P. cuts of Bava's great La maschera del demonio. Because Les Baxter's more aggressive and emphatic music score is how I saw the film before the advent of DVD, I have to say that this is for me the better version of the two. The obvious way to improve things would be to marry the uncut European version with the American audio track. Not only would the visuals be of a slightly better quality, we'd also get the extra footage of romantic material and the bits of gore scattered here and there. Of course, if we want to get really radical with film history, someone could hire Ms. Steele to dub her entire part and produce a full new audio track, with Les Baxter's music, new voices and a fantastic new set of sound effects. I'm sure I'd love it for the first three viewings... and then wonder where Paul Frees went. 1 
What a great opportunity for an unsolicited personal indulgence... if you discovered Mario Bava in the 1990s, there's a small chance you might like to know how we older fans discovered him in eons past. If not, check out the earlier review or skip on down to the quality notes below.
I missed the film's 1961 release entirely, and with the exception of a photo or two in Famous Monsters of Filmland, really wasn't aware of the existence of Black Sunday until Drake Douglas's 1966 book Horror! It offers a fairly poetic overview of basic movie monsters and as an extra benefit introduced me to the authors E. A. Poe, H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen. Douglas never mentions Bava or Steele by name but devotes three pages to waxing enthusiastic on the film's photography and atmosphere.
At UCLA I was able to rent movies for the dorm crowds, taking over from Randy Cook. He showed us Psycho and Touch of Evil, whereas my big draw for Halloween 1971 was a triple bill: 'Scope 16mm prints of Blood and Roses and The Fearless Vampire Killers from Films Incorporated; and from Audio Brandon, Black Sunday. I'd never seen it before. The crowd liked the first film, loved the second, and Black Sunday had people jumping out of their seats. It was even more violent than Horror of Dracula, the previous year's Halloween treat. By that time I was into Danger: Diabolik and Black Sabbath, had scratched my head at the incomprehensible What! on a tiny B&W TV. From friend Robert S. Birchard, I bought a bleary B&W 16mm print of Riccardo Freda's The Horrible Dr. Hichcock.
This was when I went to work in the UCLA's Theater Arts Reading room, a job that slowly supplanted my other part-time jobs in Westwood, working on a parking lot and then ushering at the Mann's National Theater. My co-workers Roger Nadelman and James Ursini were great friends, showing me the library's special resources. The place had an original King Kong souvenir premiere booklet, the one with the cover made of thin metal, the color of brass. A big rack of screenplays in the back had both final draft and continuity scripts for hundreds of films -- which is where I first became aware of the continuity discrepancy at the end of Kiss Me Deadly. James Ursini was my intellectual film connection
Alain Silver later started his own CD music label Bay Cities, and released the Les Baxter soundtrack for Black Sunday. Then a European cut of Black Sunday appeared on VHS, that gave us the opportunity to hear Roberto Nicolosi's original music bed, which made zero impact compared to Les Baxters' barnstorming score. But the film's additional scenes and little added shots of gore surprised us. Instead of fading to black for three or four seconds when the pock-faced Witch Asa kisses Dr. Kruvajan, the shot held on the kiss. Incredible. |
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Douglas might have found a friend with critic Tom Weaver -- he praises some of the Hammer films but overall judges them "lacking in story content and true atmospheric horror." Not long after that I was introduced to the books of Carlos Clarens and Ivan Butler, who devoted ample space to Black Sunday, even if Mario Bava remained something of an unknown quantity. I believe that in some cases the writers may have been thrown by the director's various nom de films - nobody had assembled anything like a chronology of his work. For me the big legit recognition event came came courtesy of critic Raymond Durgnat, in his superb film book 
at UCLA. We once stopped and talked to John Houseman, who was doing his own research. Jim had been published and was just starting a writing association with Alain Silver, who had been his close friend from Jesuit school forward. Jim read French and Italian and had studied horror in European literature. He could translate arcane text passages from Ornella Volta's book 
L.A. grindhouse for six hours to see 
