Movie: Black Sunday (AKA The Mask of Satan)

James is sick, Liz is training puppies, so I'm home alone. Time to do some writing.

Yesterday morning, I watched Black Sunday, on old horror movie I picked up super-cheap on a recommendation and never had time to watch. Black Sunday is Tim Burton's favorite horror movie (according to the marketing blurbs on the packaging, anyway), an Italian horror film done in the early 50s before there really were such things as Italian horror films. It's a vampire flick set in the mid-1800s, with all the appropriate gothic scenery: ruined cathedrals, old crypts, crumbling castles, mobs with torches and pitchforks, the works. It was surprisingly gruesome, too: the "mask" in the alternate title is a spiked iron affair nailed to the face of a witch with a huge mallot, and they didn't spare any blood.

It seems pretty tame and cliche by today's standards, but there were certainly a couple of wince moments, and some really cool special effects. Probably worth more as a historical curiosity than a horror film, but I've seem much worse.