The Mask of the Demon / The Mask of Satan / Black Sunday (1960)

    Well that escalated quickly.

    I wouldn’t have thought that three years would make such a drastic difference but I guess Mario Bava had other ideas.  Everything violence-related in ‘Night of the Demon’ was offscreen, implied, or at the worst bloodless.  Although ‘Black Sunday’ is also in black and white so I can’t speak to the actual colors this one is all in favor of showing all the blood it can.  Some of the effects and things shown on screen, while tame by any measure now, are legitimately somewhat shocking to see from a movie sixty-plus years old.

Gotta give 'em credit for accuracy.

    Even before this, his first official movie, Mario Bava was a long-time veteran of Italian cinema, following after his father who had been an artist and special-effects photographer in the Italian silent film industry.  This special-effects background would turn out to be very important.  Bava started as a camera man and cinematographer and eventually worked his way up to directing features by stepping in to finish troubled productions.  He was eventually allowed to fully direct his first movie, ‘La Maschera del Demonio,’ or ‘The Mask of the Demon.’  After heavy international editing and redubbed English dialogue the picture was retitled ‘Black Sunday.’  Interestingly enough it received far more praise and interest outside of Italy, although it has since been reappraised and is now seen as instrumental in the formation of the Italian horror drama.

    It’s also considered his best work, which is interesting since I have at least one more Bava film I intend to see this month, 1971’s ‘Lisa and the Devil.’  Upon my original watch I was surprised at the seeming assurance and confidence of what I’d thought was a first time-director, but I suppose you can’t spend more than twenty years working within the industry without picking up some pointers.  I can’t say that the acting or plot in this movie is much to be impressed by, although there are moments, but the direction, cinematography, special effects, and especially set design are some of the best I’ve seen from films of this era.  Also, although it retains the English dialogue and international title, I did confirm that I watched the uncut version.  What an age we live in.

    Oh, and a couple of side notes: the script for this movie started as an adaptation of the novella ‘Viy’ by Nikolai Gogol but was heavily rewritten, basically only retaining the fact that it involves a witch.  This same story has been more faithfully adapted a number of times, possibly most notably in 1967 with director Aleksandr Ptushko, helmer of such fine MST3K films as ‘The Magic Voyage of Sinbad,’ ‘The Sword and the Dragon,’ and ‘The Day the Earth Froze,’ albeit in highly edited forms.

    This movie opens very strong.  The first image we see is that of a fire, with the camera pulling back to reveal a muscled, behooded figure heating up torture implements.  A stentorian voiceover intones that vampires are abroad in the land.  This plot point is eventually dropped as they were effectively writing and rewriting the script on the fly during production so trust me, we’re dealing
with a witch.

    Who we’re quickly introduced to tied to a standing torture rack of some kind.  They brand her back with the mark of Satan (which is apparently an ‘S,’ the devil’s not big on subtlety), directly showing it even.  Her brother is the one leading the mob putting her and her lover to death.  They brandish the titular mask of Satan, the inside of which is studded with long spikes.  It’s surprising enough when they show it being placed on her face over her screams, but then a big dude with a mallet wallops it firmly into place, blood running everywhere.  It’s great.  Over her screams she curses her entire line, claiming she’ll be back.  A storm erupts, putting out the flames, so instead of just waiting to burn her body after the rain they stick her in the family crypt and move on with their day.

    Two centuries later (this movie has only 86 minutes and it’s not going to waste many of them) two doctors are traveling through the area by coach.  They lose a wheel taking a path through the woods and while they’re waiting for the driver to fix it they wander over into a nearby crypt.  Here is where the set design and cinematography really start to kick in, it’s all cobwebs and fog machines and these crumbly rococo designs.  They wander around until they find the stone sarcophagus of the witch, who is now decayed down into a skeleton.  We can see this because there’s a pane of glass built into the sarcophagus lid over the witch’s face (mask still firmly in place) so the big ol’ cross right on top of it is always right visible to the skull.  The younger doctor, named Andrej Gorobec, goes back to help with the coach while the older doctor, named Andrea Checchi, contemplates the corpse.

The rubber bat's around there somewhere.

    He is then attacked by, I’m sorry, a very large but very obviously rubber bat.  Many of the effects in this movie are impressive, this is not one of them.  He flails around, managing to not only smash the stone cross but also the pane of glass in the coffin.  Once the bat is dealt with and his colleague has returned from helping with the coach he decides to reach into the tomb and wrench off the mask to reveal a skeletal face covered in spiders.  He manages to slice open his hand and drip blood in an eye socket, which is something of a theme that doesn’t entirely pay off.  He also grabs a small triptych from the tomb in classic Indiana Jones fashion.

    On their way back to the coach they suddenly see in the doorway to the tomb the witch!  It’s quickly established that this is the daughter of the local count and the witch’s descendant, you see where this is going, but it’s a pretty jarring moment.  I will note that young Gorobec is immediately and obviously wanting to bang.  It’s presented as love at first sight but the way the actor plays it it comes across as just intensely horny.

    Here’s where that special effects background really starts to pay off.  We go back to the skeletal witch and the eye sockets, which are reacting to the drops of blood by bubbling up organically and turning back into eyeballs.  Once you look up how it was done it’s fairly simple but a really great effect nonetheless.

    We cut to the local castle and the local aristocracy, consisting of the Count and his son and daughter, who we’ve met already.  The Count is staring into the fire freaking out
about how it’s coming up on two hundred years since the opening of the movie and apparently some bad stuff went down around the hundred-year mark so he is expecting the worst.  The lighting and set design continue to be gorgeous.

    Next we cut to an inn where young Gorobec has gotten drunk and staggers off to bed while Checchi decides to take a stroll in the nighttime air, then also eventually goes to bed.  This is intercut with the witch waking up in the sarcophagus, calling to her dead lover to arise (he just got a measly grave, no fancy resting place for him) which he does, all zomibified.  He’s then shown creeping on the Count in bed, who drives him off with a cross then proceeds to lose his actual shit, which causes his kids to send down the village for the doctors.

    In a confusing bit of plot that does get cleared up later it’s the zombie lover who shows up to collect Dr. Checchi.  There’s a gorgeous semi slow-motion sequence of the zombie flogging the carriage horses to carry the doctor to the castle that comes off as deliriously dream-like, it’s great.  When they get to the castle the zombie leads him down through secret passages back to the crypt.  The doctor tries to flee but is locked in, then the sarcophagus explodes and the witch mind controls him to come over and give her a kiss, which lets her feed on his blood and restore herself and puts him under her control.  Again, this starts with vampires, ends with witches.

    Dr. Checchi, now obviously evil, shows up at the Count’s bedside.  He is cold and distant, dismissive of the Count’s ravings, waves a hand and causes him to sleep, and demands his cross be removed from the room.  His kids see no problem with any of this and happily leave them alone.

    Surprise, surprise the next morning the Count is dead and Checchi is nowhere to be found.  Young Gorobec hears the Doctor went to the castle in the night and decides to wander off to ogle the daughter some more.  He finds the Count’s children rather pissed off.  He examines the Count and finds a hole in his neck.  The daughter faints and young Gorobec makes his move, catching her as she falls and staring down her dress.  A note: some of the international editing of the movie was for ‘scenes of violence and sexuality.’  The violence is pretty obvious but I had a hard time identifying the scenes of sexuality and this is the closest I could come up with because this scene is all about cleavage.

Looks like true love to me.

    The movie has around half an hour to go at this point so it really starts to move.  There’s suddenly a mob in the castle, led by the local priest who from the this point on is a walking exposition dump / plot facilitator as he knows everything that’s going on and tells everyone what to do.  The sudden mob is because they found the body of the carriage driver, apparently killed and replaced by the zombie lover.  Various shenanigans as the kids won’t leave the castle, zombie lover and Checchi are shown lurking in the secret passages, Gorobec finds the triptych from the crypt, runs into the possessed Checchi and unsurprisingly does not get a straight answer about what’s going on, then meets with the priest the next day and gives him the triptych which causes the priest to instantly suss out a plan of action. 

    Gorobec returns to the castle and through a series of misadventures he and the Count’s son find the secret passage to the crypt, he runs off to follow up with the priest leaving the son to be locked in the passage to be attacked by the zombie, they find Dr. Checchi in the grave the zombie rose from for apparent reasons, a couple of more great special effects where a cross smokes when they press it to his forehead then knife right to the eye!  This apparently kills him for real, which actually does come up again in the plot but is never really explained.

Just stabbing some eyes with a priest, as you do.

    Meanwhile the Count’s daughter awakes in the night and wanders around the castle wondering where everyone is.  She comes across her father lying in state, who promptly rises and goes for her neck.  The zombie intervenes, tossing him into the fire, then grabs the daughter to feed to the witch.  She’s not having a great day. 

    Young Gorobec returns to the secret passage and fights the zombie.  Next is the other standout special effects sequence where the witch is shown draining the life and youth from her descendent, through what I swore at the time was immaculate time-lapse effects but was done by both more and less impressive practical effects.  Age lines appear in on the face and hands of the Count’s daughter in one shot and disappear from the faces and hands of the witch in another.  This was done by a combination of red and green light and makeup.  Since the movie was shot in black and white they used red and green light to alternately hide and reveal red and green makeup depending on which effect they needed.  Very clever.

    Zombie dealt with Gorobec rushes to the crypt where he finds the now youthful witch proclaiming the now aged Count’s daughter is really the witch and he should totally stab her in the eye.  He goes to do so but notices the daughter is still wearing her cross so turns on the witch, pulling away her dress and revealing she’s still a skeleton from the neck down, which is a nice little shock.  She tries to work her mind-magic on him and he’s maybe starting to succumb when the priest and his mob are suddenly there. 

    Gorobec points the mob in the direction of the witch then breaks down sobbing over the corpse of the woman he apparently loves.  Even utters the sentence “I’ll never love again.”  As the crowd puts together another bonfire and hoists the witch onto it the daughter wakes from her ‘death’ and the two embrace.  The end.

    Like I said there’s not a whole lot of plot or characterization over those 86 minutes but there’s a whole lot of style and atmosphere.  Clearly by the standards of even ten years later, much less sixty, this movie is entirely tame, but at the time I’ve no doubt it was fairly shocking.  I’m a little sad to hear that Mario Bava apparently never reached these heights again, although I do hear pretty great things about ‘A Bay of Blood.’  That’s going to have to wait for another time, though.  I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

 

Night of the Demon / Curse of the Demon (1957)

    And so it begins with what is entirely likely to be the classiest movie I’ll be covering this month, the Jacques Tourneur classic ‘Night of the Demon,’ retitled in the US as ‘Curse of the Demon.’  There exists some confusion as to the original running time with most sources currently claiming a 95 minute run time for the original “British Version.”  This is in fact an extended version intended for Europe (where it was released as a stand-alone film and not as part of a double feature as it was originally distributed in the UK and US) and is more accurately referred to as the “Continental Version.”  Both the original US and UK version runs 83 minutes but the 95 minutes version is generally now considered the standard.  This is the version I watched and from the description of the extra scenes in the Continental Version, with one exception I’ll get to, they didn’t add much to the film except run time.

That sure is a henge, that is.

    To my embarrassment this the only the second Jacques Tourneur movie I’ve ever seen and the first wasn’t “Cat People,” which is certainly on the list.  Mind you, that first one was “Out of the Past,” which I managed to catch during a college class on film and roman noir when the professor showed us his treasured laser disc copy, back when physical medium was still the only way to see these things.  It’s been a number of years but as I recall I deeply, deeply loved “Out of the Past,” one of the top five film noirs ever made in my opinion, and “Night of the Demon,” while a fine film, is nowhere in the same league.

    This was almost an RKO production and it shows, it has a certain formal charm to it that masks just how small a production it is.  I am generally not one to complain about a slowly paced movie and I didn’t mind it at the time but when the credits rolled after 95 minutes and I cast my mind back over the experience and reviewed my notes what struck me is just how little happened in this movie.  With not much tightening at all you could have cut this down to an hour easily.  You would remove some of the atmosphere and deliberate pacing but in the end I don’t think it adds up to much.

    One last production note before we start in on the plot: the movie does in fact reveal the demon and it’s a rather embarrassed-looking puppet.  Although there is some dispute it seems pretty clear both from comments by the director, screenwriter, and stars (and the clear intent of the entire rest of the movie) that these shots were inserted over their objections by the producer.  What was originally intended to be at least a somewhat ambiguous story, never fully confirming that anything supernatural was actually happening, instead fully confirmed and indeed directly showed the demon.  It doesn’t ruin the movie but it does stick out as clear executive interference.

    The opening does a pretty good job of establishing the basic premise.  Somewhere in England a Professor Harrington rushes to an estate home where he demands to see a Dr. Karswell.  Upon being shown to his office he begs Karswell to “stop it.”  Karswell, played by veteran character actor Niall MacGinnis, comes off as rather charming and reasonable, as he will continue to be over the course of the movie.  Karswell is, in my eyes, the only truly interesting character in the movie.  Peggy Cummings as Joanna Harrington, the professor’s niece, has some good moments when she’s not being sucked into the worthless romantic subplot with our eventual hero, Dr. John Holden, played by Dana Andrews a long time after “The Best Years of Our Lives.”  I will eventually grow to slightly hate his character.

    Apparently professor Harrington has been publicly attacking Karswell as a fraud, which he did not take well, and has had a curse placed upon him.  After hearing his promises to publicly retract his accusations Karswell makes as if to agree to remove the curse but pauses after hearing that a length of parchment with runes on it he’d given the professor had been burned.  He then turns out the professor with only promises to ‘see what he can do.’  The professor drives home whereupon he sees our puppet demon, tries to drive away only to crash into a pole, and gets electrocuted.

    The rest of the movie is a slow follow up on this.  Our American hero John Holden flies in to attend a very undefined ‘conference’ intended to debunk the supernatural whereupon he learns of the death of professor Harrington.  He’s familiar with Karswell and starts to make the same kind of accusations.

     Here’s where my biggest problem with the movie comes in: ambiguity about certain things, the extent of Karswell’s powers, the exact nature of the demon, that’s all well and good, but basic, basic things are left incredibly nebulous.  We’re told Holden is attending a conference but aside from a few of his colleagues who visit him in his hotel room we never see the conference, hear of its agenda, and except for one scene near the end it exists merely as a device to get an American to London and to antagonize Karswell.

    Karswell himself, although an intriguing personality, is left almost entirely undefined in terms of how and why he does what he does.  He’s accused several times of running a cult, but we only see one terrorized family very briefly and that was the only scene not included in the original version that I thought added to the film.  Take that out and this supposed cult is entirely offscreen.  We’re told that they give him money to support his lifestyle but we never learn of his background or intentions.  Although he talks several times about witchcraft the most impressive thing his does is apparently conjure a windstorm briefly, everything else is simple sleight of hand.  He’s generally friendly and urbane, even when making death threats, and during the scenes of him alone with his mother, which we are presumably meant to assume show his true self, he has exactly the same personality.  It’s very odd.

Behold the face of evil!

    Then there is the matter of the runes.  The direct threat, or ticking clock, or however you want to phrase it, is a length of paper with a line of runes written down one side.  Karswell apparently sics his demon on people by slipping them this length of paper then waiting several days for the demon to kill them.  The movie ties these runes directly to Stonehenge, opening with a voiceover during a montage of shots of the henge as well as an insert scene of Holden briefly visiting Stonehenge for no particular reason.  Karswell is accused several times of running a Satanic cult, and the one time we get an actual Karswell devote to express some kind of belief system it’s literally just “good is evil and evil is good.”  Perhaps in 1957 the concept of olden-times writing was enough to conflate runes and Satan but from a modern perspective it’s just puzzling.

    The movie is essentially one long slow burn.  After a brief phone conversation Holden and Karswell meet in a library.  Karswell is very upfront about who he is and what he does but still offers to lend him a book that bubbles under the surface for the entire rest of the move threatening to become a plot point but never does.  During their meeting he slips Holden a length of parchment containing runes and we’re off to the races.

    What ensues is a series of small escalations.  Holden will be told over and over he’s in danger but never actually is.  He will occasionally see and hear odd things but they’re never really threatening.  A couple of times he mentions he’s cold when everyone else considers it warm, which again ends up going nowhere.  The one member of the cult that’s actually plot relevant is mentioned early on as having been accused of murder and being catatonic in the hospital and slowly over the next hour they secure his release to interview him, and even that is handled through throwaway bits of dialogue of no particular importance.

    The only sequence that I think entirely works is when Holden and Harrington’s niece take up Karswell’s offer to examine the book by visiting his estate.  When the two get there he’s giving a magic show to the village children, doing simple sleight of hand magic, then he and Holden have a decent little conversation about how the line between psychology and reality isn’t always so clear cut.  This scene is why I am a firm believer that the actual demon shots were inserted over the director’s objections.

    This is when Karswell conjures the windstorm, after which he casually drops that Holden is going to die in three days if he doesn’t stop attacking him.  After they leave he confides to his mother that he’s made some kind of undefined bargain where to maintain his powers either others have to die or he does.  This is a pretty interesting idea, at no point does Karswell seem to take pleasure in the power he has over others, but again this goes mostly unexamined.

    During a dinner date our supposed hero essentially forces on Harrington’s niece Holden discovers the length of runes slipped to him by Karswell, at which point it flies from his hand directly towards the fire but is stopped by a fire grate.  It’s a neat little effect but you rather get used to it as it’s the main source of tension for the rest of the movie as it keeps trying to fly away from his grasp.

The only thing to stop ultimate evil: the fire grate.

    Some more incidentals happen, he visits the cult family, is persuaded to attend a séance held by Karswell’s mother, who does seem to be an overall decent lady (which included a moment that made me bolt upright in shock, I’ll address that in a moment), breaks into Karswell’s house to look at the book before being attacked by an apparent conjured panther then is politely shown the door by Karswell, interrogates the cult member as part of that nebulous ‘conference’ who manages to throw himself out of a window to his death but not before revealing the only way to survive the curse is to return the parchment to the person who gave it to you.

    As the deadline approaches Holden decided to return the parchment to Karswell who is about to board a train to avoid this very thing.  For some reason that isn’t even borderline explained he also kidnaps Harrington’s niece.  Holden manages to board the train and in a scene that’s just two rewrites away from an early Marx Brothers routine keeps offering things to Karswell who increasingly nervously declines.  Eventually when the train stops at the next station two police officers enter the cabin, still following up on the death of Professor Harrington, and in the confusion of bags and coats and papers Holden manages to slip the parchment to Karswell who instantly twigs.  He attempts to return the parchment but it flies out of his hand and onto the tracks.  He chases after it only to watch it spontaneously catch fire as the deadline expires and the puppet demon shows up and kills him.  The officers examine the body and decide he must have been killed by a train and Holden and the niece walk off without examining the body in a futile attempt to have an ambiguous ending.

Yeah, I know they tried, but ... yeah.

    This is widely considered a classic horror film and while I did overall enjoy it the one thing it most definitely is not is a horror film.  Suspense, sure, psychological drama, fine, but there’s nothing remotely scary about this.  This is an extremely simple story told with deliberate pacing, some decent effects and lighting, and one really good performance.  I do wish my copy had been of a higher quality, I wasn’t quite willing to splash out on the DVD for this and as far as I can tell this isn’t streaming anywhere, as the cinematography and lighting would probably be pretty impressive at a decent bit rate.

    And as for the part that made me full on bolt upright?  During the séance scene the medium channels the late Professor Harrington and in describing his death intones the immortal words, “It’s in the trees!  It’s coming!”  So yes, in case you were ever curious, this movie is the source for the opening bit of Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love.”  The more you know.