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Despite its reputation as one of the greatest and most influential of all horror films, there is surprisingly little literature dedicated to Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960), and this contribution to the Devil's Advocates series is the first single book dedicated to it. Martyn Conterio places the film in the historical context of being one of the first sound Italian horror films and how its success kick-started the Italian horror boom. The author considers the particularly Italian perspective on the gothic that the film pioneered and its fresh and pioneering approach to horror tropes such as the vampire and the witch and considers how the casting of British 'Scream Queen' Barbara Steele was crucial to the film's effectiveness and success.

[...]the mystery in the film is not who has been killing brides, sometimes on their wedding nights, but why Harrington has been doing so. [...]just make sure She doesn’t drip! (Bava, Blu Ray cover) Tim Lucas (not to mention multiple other commentators) has noted that its closest more contemporary counterpart is Mary Harron’s American Psycho (1990), drawn from the Brad Easton Ellis novel, which also asks the audience to take the point of view of a psychotic killer (Tim Lucas, quoted in Cremonini). O’Brien cites at length the phenomenological approach of Vivian Sobchack, which argues that “the ‘attention’ made visible in the zoom is analogous to learning as an ‘active and constitutive state,’ rather than a benign status quo.” O’Brien then offers his own theory, which argues that the zoom can “serve as a subtle reminder to audiences that a film’s production is a physically located process – and that the fictions we witness are a product of people going somewhere and filming something” (227-231). Haptic cinema, on the other hand, often makes use of soft focus, over- or under-exposure, shaky camera movement, grainy film stock, optical printing, scratching of the emulsion.

[...]in the Spring of 1995, when I wrote the first edition of my monograph on Mario Bava, published by the Milan-based “Il Castoro,” there were only two other books on him, both in French: Mario Bava by Pascal Martinet (Paris, Edilig, 1984) and a collection of essays of the same title edited by Jean-Louis Léutrat (Liège, Editions du Céfal, 1994). [...]the cult of Mario Bava had almost become a massive one, thanks also to the blessing of Tarantino—who in the meantime had become the Pope of Italian “B” cinema—and the widespread diffusion of previously little-seen titles through their home-video release. Vittorio Spinazzola, a communist who, having studied Gramsci seriously, didn’t have any prejudice and could appreciate sword-and-sandal and Leone and Tessari flicks; Piero Zanotto, one of the first who popularized comic books in Italy; and Bernardino Zapponi, a small-town intellectual who came to Rome to work in the film industry as a scriptwriter, a Sade scholar who in 1966 planned to dedicate a whole issue of his magazine “Il Delatore” (which unfortunately ceased publications shortly afterward) to Bava. [...]in the new millennium it was necessary to put juvenile enthusiasm aside and explain, in a more lucid manner and more as film historians than as critics, the peculiarities of Bava’s cinema.

The ones I keep in a murky alley of my cinephiliac museum include the white face of a demon surrounded by darkness, an animated headless horseman and a little girl nodding her head while holding a ball. In a single take, Bava shows the audience that there is no humanity left in that body. [...]he emblematizes a Lovecraftian concept of interstellar terror. According to the French scholar, such simple action has a deep meaning.

Just a month after the publication of I vampiri tra noi it would be the turn of Renato Polselli’s L’amante del vampiro (aka The Vampire and the Ballerina, 1960) to hit the screens. Besides its meritorious pioneering work and philological accuracy, I vampiri tra noi —graced with a preface by Roger Vadim, whose film adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, included in the anthology, would find theatrical distribution in Italy only in late 1960 as Il sangue e la rosa (aka Blood and Roses) —is of vital importance to the history of Italian cinema for at least a couple more reasons. [...]the scriptwriters’ brilliancy—mine included—made sure that absolutely nothing of Gogol’s story remained in my film,” 3 he would later quip, in a 1976 questionnaire interview marked by a noticeable sarcasm throughout. Bava’s first outline of the project, a four-page synopsis dated September 1959, was actually much closer to the original tale than the finished film. [...]even though he is not credited among the scriptwriters in La maschera del demonio, Bava definitely collaborated in the shaping of the story, as he himself acknowledged in the above-mentioned questionnaire and as the ministerial papers at the State Archives confirm. In the film, Miss Chester has the face of French actress Jacqueline Pierreux, Jean-Piere Léaud’s mother. [...]the horrific Miss Perkins was initially to be played by a real actress, Adriana Facchetti: instead, what we see in the film is actually a grotesque wax mannequin sculpted by Bava’s father Eugenio, whose fixed, obtuse grin is both droll and spine-chilling at the same time.

The Duchess possesses no special powers and does not exhibit any of the composite characteristics of the ideal-typical Gothic vampire, whether sensitivity to sunlight and holy water; aversion to crucifixes and garlic; ability to transform into other forms; inability to be seen in mirrors; sleeping in a coffin; drinking her victims' blood, or only capable of being killed in particular ways. For genre scholar Gary Needham (2003) The Girl Who Knew too Much served to indicate the giallo film had arrived, due to its literal foregrounding of the theme of jet plane travel, one to be found in a number of later Italian horror/ thriller films more generally22 as well as Bava's oeuvre specifically23; its highly self-reflexive citations of giallo literature, whether the specifics of \"The Alphabet Murders\" alluding to Agatha Christie's The A.B.C Murders (1936) or the giallo more generally within the diegesis and the voice-off; and its introduction of a number of key themes, most notably the eye-witness who finds that they will not be believed by the authorities and/or that some vital detail of the crime scene is eluding them. Helga and her associates at the parapsychology conference seek to establish their discourse as a scientific one, indicating that extra sensory perceptions are found in various animal species and in infant humans before they acquire the power of speech. On his second visit, stemming from belatedly realising a window shown in the book's photograph of the house is no longer there, he does however discover a mummified corpse in a hidden, bricked-up room, perhaps recalling Poe's The Black Cat (1843) and The Cask of Amontadillo (1846).25 Marc is then knocked unconscious by the killer, who sets the place alight, but is saved by Gianna's timely arrival.

Il n'empeche que, quelle que soit la qualité variable de ses films, Bava est un auteur, avec ses themes, ses éclairs (Le Masque du démon vu a sa sortie, dans sa fraîcheur et sans appareil critique, reste inoubliable), ses élégances, ses facilités, ses bouts de ficelle comme une œuvre d'art et son sens du plan reconnaissable entre dix (il suffit de comparer avec ses collegues, Lucio Fulci, Aldo Lado ou meme Dario Argento). Les remarques sur le rôle de la voix comme \"élément de déstabilisation\" (p. 115) ou la description d'un plan de L'Île de l'épouvante (p. 130) ou du panoramique initial de La Ruée des Vikings (p. 127) démontrent pourquoi aucun film de Bava n'est indifférent: meme dans les moins réussis (on pense a Arizona Bill ou a Roy Colt et Winchester Jack), il y a toujours une pépite a extraire, au milieu d'un flot sans intéret. D'autant que si la bibliographie en fin de volume est fournie2, on ne trouve pas de filmographie, ce qui est pourtant la moindre des choses dans une monographie; certes, wikipedia est la pour renseigner ceux qui n'ont pas completement exploré le territoire qui va du Masque du démon (1960) aux Démons de la nuit (1977), mais c'est un peu dommage - on ne peut imaginer que l'éditeur ait été a deux pages pres. Ceci n'empeche pas ce petit livre (il tient aisément dans la poche) d'apporter quelques pierres personnelles a l'édifice que la postérité a mis bien du temps a entreprendre - honnetement, les amateurs, peu nombreux, qui se réjouissaient jadis devant La Planéte des vampires, n'imaginaient pas que, cinquante ans apres, d'autres amateurs y trouveraient le meme plaisir. 1.