Artist Black Sunday

Working, as usual, on a low budget, Italian horror movie master Mario Bava turned 1960's Black Sunday into an experience akin to wandering into someone else's nightmare. The shadow-drenched, black-and-white film is ostensibly a gothic tale of vampires and witches, but the lurid, overheated, sexually charged, and (for its time) graphically violent images soon overwhelm the plot, suggesting what might have happened if Val Lewton and Alfred Hitchcock had ever teamed up. At the time of its release, Black Sunday was censored for American audiences, with three minutes taken out of the film due to violent content, but it has since been restored to its original glory.

Updated 10/19/2009