Introduction to Black Sunday

Hi everyone and welcome to this special World Youth Day screening of Mario Bava's 1960 gothic horror film, Black Sunday. Are there any pilgrims here today?.. No, it's probably just as well, because this film, like many of the best horror films, is a reminder of how the sins and evils of the past, in this case, the persecution of "witches", can come back to haunt the present.

I didn't program this film specifically as a response to the events of WYD. It was just one of those fortunate accidents that it happened to coincide with the Pope's visit to Australia and it only dawned on me earlier in the week that the film had some relevance, however tenuous, to the papal visit. I don't want to put the boot in too much, as I am a Catholic (lapsed) myself and have enjoyed seeing all the pilgrims about town. I even saw some singing nuns on the bus the other day and for a minuteI thought I was stuck in a 1970s disaster movie, but I did think it was a bit rich for the Pope to come all the way to Sydney just to preach about the perils of violence and sex in the media, especially considering the most violent film in recent memory is a film based on the crucifixion, and that collectors of erotica have long envied the Vatican collection, the largest collection of erotic art and literature in the world. With all the things wrong in this world, I think violence and sex on TV, in the movies, and on the internet are way down the list.

The star of today's film, Barbara Steele, is (like the Pope) a vehement critic of violence in the movies. Her role in this film made her a star, or at least a scream queen, and although she made a nice career and appeared in dozens of horror movies in Italy, the USA and Britain, Steele used to call the audience for her movies "sexually disturbed teenage boys." Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!

This psychopathologisation of the audience for horror movies goes back at least to the Universal horror movies of the 1930s, but it was 1960, the year that saw the release of Black Sunday, Psycho and Peeping Tom, that the idea of horror movie viewer as pervert began to get some traction in the public consciousness. The film that best dramatises this idea is Michael Powell's once-derided, now classic Peeping Tom. The film explicitly equates movie viewing and movie making with voyeurism and even murder. As the sixties progressed this idea crops up in the work of Susan Sontag in her famous essay On Photography, in Yoko Ono's avant-garde film Rape and in Laura Mulvey's seminal essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. This idea of the horror movie fan as psychopathic continues even today. The most recent example I can think of is the hit movie Scream, where the murderers are revealed to be the nerdy horror movie loving geeks. The teenage male murderers absorbed so many horror movie cliches they turned into one.

I haven't seen Black Sunday for over twenty years, so I'm not going to say much about it, except that there are several different versions of the movie. There's the Italian version, filmed in polyglot with the actors speaking in their native language and dubbed into Italian. There's the British version, which was revoiced by English actors and trimmed of its more violent excesses and then there's the version you are about to see, the American version, which was revoiced by American actors, again trimmed of some of the more grisly moments and rescored by the then popular composer Les Baxter. Although this is hardly the definitive version, no amount of censor trims or cheesy orchestral scoring can diminish the impact of Bava's eye for set design, lighting and cinematography or his ability to create a wonderfully spooky atmosphere. If you saw Barrie Pattison's recent lecture on the history of Italian popular cinema you would have seen the early Bava educational film, Geometry Lesson. Even in a staid educational film, Bava was able to weave his macabre magic.

If you like the film, I would recommend reading Tim Lucas' wonderful book on Mario Bava, All the Colors of the Dark. There is also a box set of his films available from Umbrella Entertainment in Australia. Enjoy the movie and hope to see you next week for Lady of Burlesque.