A vengeful witch and her fiendish servant return from the grave and begin a bloody campaign to possess the body of the witch’s beautiful look-alike descendant. Only the girl’s brother and a handsome doctor stand in her way. —IMDb
Mario Bava was born in Sanremo, Liguria, Italy. The son of Eugenio Bava, a sculptor who became a pioneer of special effects photography and subsequently one of the great cameramen of Italian silent pictures, Mario Bava’s first ambition was to become a painter. Unable to turn out paintings at a profitable rate, he went into his father’s business, working as an assistant to other Italian cinematographers like Massimo Terzano, while also offering assistance to his father who headed the special effects department at Benito Mussolini’s film factory, the Instituto LUCE.
Bava became a cinematographer in his own right in 1939, shooting two short films with Roberto Rossellini. He made his feature debut in the early 1940s. Bava’s camerawork was an instrumental factor in developing the screen personas of such stars of the period as Gina Lollobrigida, Steve Reeves and Aldo Fabrizi.
Bava co-directed his first genre film in 1958: Le morte viene dallo spazio (The Day the Sky Exploded… read more
I wish I could show this to a crowd of Twilight fans, saying "Now THIS is how you make a vampire movie!"
Bava's atmospheric, dreamlike, and macabre black & white masterpiece. Starring the ultimate gorgeous queen of the genre, the statuesque Barbara Steele. Embodying the classic Universal vibe and the more Grand Guignol Hammer atmosphere, Black Sunday is, without a doubt, the greatest Gothic horror film.