15 Great Italian Horror Films You Must See Before You Die

12. Black Sunday (Mario Bava, 1960)

"Cover her face with the mask of Satan! Nail it down! May the cleansing flames reduce her foul body to ashes!"

1960 was a very important year in horror history: it was a landmark year for voyeuristic horror-thrillers with Psycho and Peeping Tom, and people's sensibilities were being challenged with Franju's controversial Eyes Without a Face. But while these guys were breaking boundaries and experimenting with ways of depicting horrors of the real world, the likes of Roger Corman and Vincent Price (who released their first Poe adaptation, The Fall of the House of Usher, in this year), and Hammer were finding great international success with the good old-fashioned period Gothic. Bava firmly established himself as a part of the latter camp with his first and perhaps most beloved film, Black Sunday.

The film kicks off with a brutal opening scene, in which a vampiric witch (played to perfection by horror goddess Barbara Steele) swears revenge on future generations before having a mask of metal spikes driven into her skull. From here on, Bava bombards us with dark crypts, grand cemeteries and ghostly, ghoulish visages every few minutes; each scene is positively dripping with Gothic imagery and atmosphere.